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A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 



A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 



BY 



H. S. SOUTTAR, F.R.C.S. 

ASSISTANT SURGEON, WEST LONDON HOSPITAL 
LATE SURGEON-IN-CHIEF, BELGIAN FIELD HOSPITAL 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 

LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD 

i9 r 5 

[All rights reserved] 






PRINTED IN ENGLAND 



J<fif€ 






TO 

THE BRAVE SOLDIERS OF BELGIUM 



PREFACE 

To write the true story of three months' work in 
a hospital is a task before which the boldest man 
might quail. Let my very dear friends of the 
Belgian Field Hospital breathe again, for I have 
attempted nothing of the sort. I would sooner 
throw aside my last claim to self-respect, and 
write my autobiography. It would at least be 
safer. But there were events which happened 
around us, there was an atmosphere in which we 
lived, so different from those of our lives at home 
that one felt compelled to try to picture them 
before they merged into the shadowy memories 
of the past. And this is all that I have attempted. 
To all who worked with me through those 
months I owe a deep debt of gratitude. That 
they would do everything in their power to 
make the hospital a success went without saying, 
but it was quite another matter that they should 
all have conspired to make the time for me one 
of the happiest upon which I shall ever look back. 
Where all have been so kind, it is almost invidious 

vii 



viii PREFACE 

to mention names, and yet there are two which 
must stand by themselves. To the genius and 
the invincible resource of Madame Sindici the 
hospital owes an incalculable debt. Her friend- 
ship is one of my most delightful memories. The 
sterling powers of Dr. Beavis brought us safely 
many a time through deep water, and but for his 
enterprise the hospital would have come to an 
abrupt conclusion with Antwerp. There could 
have been no more delightful colleague, and with- 
out his aid much of this book would never have 
been written. 

For the Belgian Field Hospital I can wish 
nothing better than that its star may continue to 
shine in the future as it has always done in the 
past, and that a sensible British public may 
generously support the most enterprising hospital 

in the war. 

H. S. S. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. TO ANTWERP - - - - 1 

H. THE HOSPITAL - - - - 11 

m. THE day's WORK - - - - - 19 

IV. ANTWERP - - - - - - 32 

V. TERMONDE - - - - 42 

VI. THE CHATEAU - - - - - 50 

VII. MALTNES - - - - - - 61 

Vm. LIERRE - - - - - - 68 

IX. A PAUSE - - - - - 79 

X. THE SIEGE - - - - - 85 

XI. CONTICH - - - - - 93 

XH. THE BOMBARDMENT — NIGHT - - - 104 

XITI. THE BOMBARDMENT — DAY - - - 110 

XTV. THE NIGHT JOURNEY .... 120 

XV. FURNES ----.. 128 

XVI. POPERINGHE - 137 

XVII. FURNES AGAIN ----- 147 

XVHI. WORK AT FURNES .... 15g 

XIX. FURNES — THE TOWN .... \QQ 

XX. A JOURNEY ..... 174 

XXI. THE AMBULANCE CORPS - 181 

XXII. PERVYSE — THE TRENCHES - - - 190 

xxm. ypres ...... 199 

XXIV. SOME CONCLUSIONS - - - - 211 



IX 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

THE NURSING STAFF, FURNES - - Frontispiice 

A WARD AT ANTWERP - - - - 12 * 

AN OPERATION AT ANTWERP - - - 22 

THE DIRECTOR, DR. BEAVIS, AT ANTWERP - - 36 

TERMONDE - - - - - 46 

LIERRE - - - - - - 74 

HOMELESS - - - - - 96 

ANTWERP — AFTER THE BOMBARDMENT - - - 116 

THE SURGICAL STAFF, FURNES - 128 

DINNER — FURNES .... - 132 

THE COURTYARD, FURNES - 132 

THE LAUNDRY, FURNES ----- 144 

MAURICE ------- 152 

A STRAW WARD, FURNES - 152 

MADAME CURIE - - - - - - 162 

ST. WALBURGA, FURNES - - - - - 166 

YPRES ------- 194 

PERVYSE ----.. 194 

THE CLOTH HALL, YPRES, AFTER BOMBARDMENT - 202 



XI 



A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 



TO ANTWERP 

When, one Saturday afternoon in September, we 
stepped on board the boat for Ostend, it was with 
a thrill of expectation. For weeks we had read 
and spoken of one thing only — the War — and 
now we were to see it for ourselves, we were even 
in some way to be a part of it. The curtain was 
rising for us upon the greatest drama in all the 
lurid history of strife. We should see the armies 
as they went out to fight, and we should care for 
the wounded when their work was done. We 
might hear the roar of the guns and the scream 
of the shells. To us, that was War. 

And, indeed, we have seen more of war in these 
few weeks than has fallen to the lot of many an 
old campaigner. We have been through the siege 
of Antwerp, we have lived and worked always 
close to the firing-line, and I have seen a great 
cruiser roll over and sink, the victim of a sub- 
marine. But these are not the things which will 
live in our minds. These things are the mere 

1 



2 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

framing of the grim picture. The cruiser has 
been blotted out by the weary faces of an endless 
stream of fugitives, and the scream of the shells 
has been drowned by the cry of a child. For, 
though the soldiers may fight, it is the people who 
suffer, and the toll of war is not the life which it 
takes, but the life which it destroys. 

I suppose, and I hope, that there is not a man 
amongst us who has not in his heart wished to 
go to the front, and to do what he could. The 
thought may have been only transitory, and may 
soon have been blotted out by self-interest; and 
there is many a strong man who has thrust it 
from him because he knew that his duty lay at 
home. But to everyone the wish must have come, 
though only to a few can come the opportunity. 
We all want to do our share, but it is only human 
that we should at the same time long to be there 
in the great business of the hour, to see war as it 
really is, to feel the thrill of its supreme moments, 
perhaps in our heart of hearts to make quite cer- 
tain that we are not cowards. And when we 
return, what do we bring with us ? We all bring 
a few bits of shell, pictures of ruined churches, 
perhaps a German helmet — and our friends are 
full of envy. And some of us return with scenes 
burnt into our brain of horror and of pathos such 
as no human pen can describe. Yet it is only 



TO ANTWERP 3 

when we sit down in the quiet of our homes that 
we realize the deeper meaning of all that we have 
seen, that we grasp the secret of the strange 
aspects of humanity which have passed before us. 
What we have seen is a world in which the social 
conventions under which we live, and which form 
a great part or the whole of most of our lives, have 
been torn down. Men and women are no longer 
limited by the close barriers of convention. They 
must think and act for themselves, and for once 
it is the men and women that we see, and not the 
mere symbols which pass as coin in a world at 
peace. To the student of men and women, the 
field of war is the greatest opportunity in the 
world. It is a veritable dissecting-room, where 
all the queer machinery that goes to the making 
of us lies open to our view. On the whole, I am 
very glad that I am a mere surgeon, and that I 
can limit my dissections to men's bodies. Human 
Anatomy is bad enough, but after the last three 
months the mere thought of an analysis of Human 
Motives fills me with terror. 

Our boat was one of the older paddle steamers. 
We were so fortunate as to have a friend at 
Court, and the best cabins on the ship were 
placed at our disposal. I was very grateful to 
that friend, for it was very rough, and our paddle- 
boxes were often under water. We consoled 



4 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

ourselves by the thought that at least in a rough 
sea we were safe from submarines, but the consola- 
tion became somewhat threadbare as time went 
on. Gradually the tall white cliffs of Dover sank 
behind us, splendid symbols of the quiet power 
which guards them. But for those great white 
cliffs, and the waves which wash their base, how 
different the history of England would have been ! 
They broke the power of Spain in her proudest 
days, Napoleon gazed at them in vain as at the 
walls of a fortress beyond his grasp, and against 
them Germany will fling herself to her own de- 
struction. Germany has yet to learn the strength 
which lies concealed behind those cliffs, the energy 
and resource which have earned for England the 
command of the sea. It was a bad day for Ger- 
many when she ventured to question that com- 
mand. She will receive a convincing answer to 
her question. 

We reached Ostend, and put up for the night 
at the Hotel Terminus. Ostend was empty, and 
many of the hotels were closed. A few bombs 
had been dropped upon the town some days 
before, and caused considerable excitement' — 
about all that most bombs ever succeed in doing, 
as we afterwards discovered. But it had been 
enough to cause an exodus. No one dreamt that 
in less than three weeks' time the town would be 



TO ANTWERP 5 

packed with refugees, and that to get either a bed 
or a meal would be for many of them almost im- 
possible. Everywhere we found an absolute con- 
fidence as to the course of the war, and the general 
opinion was that the Germans would be driven 
out of Belgium in less than six weeks. 

Two of our friends in Antwerp had come down 
to meet us by motor, and we decided to go back 
with them by road, as trains, though still running, 
were slow and uncertain. It was a terrible day, 
pouring in torrents and blowing a hurricane. Our 
route lay through Bruges and Ghent, but the 
direct road to Bruges was in a bad condition, and 
we chose the indirect road through Blankenberghe. 
We left Ostend by the magnificent bridge, with its 
four tall columns, which opens the way towards 
the north-east, and as we crossed it I met the first 
symbol of war. A soldier stepped forward, and 
held his rifle across our path. My companion 
leaned forward and murmured, " Namur," the 
soldier saluted, and we passed on. It was all 
very simple, and, but for the one word, silent; but 
it was the first time I had heard a password, and 
it made an immense impression on my mind. We 
had crossed the threshold of War. I very soon 
had other things to think about. The road from 
Ostend to Blankenberghe is about the one good 
motor road in Belgium, and my companion 



6 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

evidently intended to demonstrate the fact to 
me beyond all possibility of doubt. We were 
driving into the teeth of a squall, but there 
seemed to be no limits to the power of his engine. 
I watched the hand of his speedometer rise till it 
touched sixty miles per hour. On the splendid 
asphalt surface of the road there was no vibra- 
tion, but a north-east wind across the sand-dunes 
is no trifle, and I was grateful when we turned 
south-eastwards at Blankenberghe, and I could 
breathe again. 

As I said, that road by the dunes is unique. 
The roads of Belgium, for the most part, conform 
to one regular pattern. In the centre is a paved 
causeway, set with small stone blocks, whilst on 
each side is a couple of yards of loose sand, or 
in wet weather of deep mud. The causeway is 
usually only just wide enough for the passing of 
two motors, and on the smaller roads it is not 
sufficient even for this. As there is no speed 
limit, and everyone drives at the top power of his 
engine, the skill required to drive without mishap 
is considerable. After a little rain the stone is 
covered with a layer of greasy mud, and to keep 
a car upon it at a high speed is positively a 
gymnastic feat. In spite of every precaution, an 
occasional descent into the mud at the roadside is 
inevitable, and from that only a very powerful 



TO ANTWERP 7 

car can extricate itself with any ease. A small 
car will often have to slowly push its way out 
backwards. In dry weather the conditions are 
almost as bad, for often the roadside is merely 
loose sand, which gives no hold for a wheel. For 
a country so damp and low-lying as Belgium, 
there is probably nothing to equal a paved road, 
but it is a pity that the paving was not made a 
little wider. Every now and then we met one 
of the huge, unwieldy carts which seem to be 
relics of a prehistoric age — rough plank affairs of 
enormous strength and a design so primitive as 
to be a constant source of wonder. They could 
only be pulled along at a slow walk and with vast 
effort by a couple of huge horses, and the load the 
cart was carrying never seemed to bear any pro- 
portion to the mechanism of its transport. The 
roads are bad, but they will not account for those 
carts. The little front wheels are a stroke of 
mechanical ineptitude positively amounting to 
genius, and when they are replaced by a single 
wheel, and the whole affair resembles a huge 
tricycle, one instinctively looks round for a 
Dinosaur. Time after time we met them stuck 
in the mud or partially overturned, but the drivers 
seemed in no way disconcerted; it was evidently 
all part of the regular business of the day. When 
one thinks of the Brussels coachwork which 



8 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

adorns our most expensive motors, and of the 
great engineering works of Liege, those carts 
are a really wonderful example of persistence 
of type. 

We passed through Bruges at a pace positively 
disrespectful to that fine old town. There is no 
town in Belgium so uniform in the magnificence 
of its antiquity, and it is good to think that — so 
far, at any rate — it has escaped destruction. As 
we crossed the square, the clock in the belfry 
struck the hour, and began to play its chimes. It 
is a wonderful old clock, and every quarter of an 
hour it plays a tune — a very attractive perform- 
ance, unless you happen to live opposite. I re- 
member once thinking very hard things about the 
maker of that clock, but perhaps it was not his 
fault that one of the bells was a quarter of a tone 
flat. At the gates our passports were examined, 
and we travelled on to Ghent by the Ecloo Road, 
one of the main thoroughfares of Belgium. Beyond 
an occasional sentry, there was nothing to indicate 
that we were passing through a country at war, 
except that we rarely saw a man of military age. 
All were women, old men, or children. Certainly 
the men of Belgium had risen to the occasion. 
The women were doing everything — working in 
the fields, tending the cattle, driving the market- 
carts and the milk-carts with their polished brass 



TO ANTWERP 9 

cans. After leaving Ghent, the men came into 
view, for at Lokeren and St. Nicholas were im- 
portant military stations, whilst nearer to Ant- 
werp very extensive entrenchments and wire en- 
tanglements were being constructed. The trenches 
were most elaborate, carefully constructed and 
covered in; and I believe that all the main ap- 
proaches to the city were defended in the same 
way. Antwerp could never have been taken by 
assault, but with modern artillery it would have 
been quite easy to destroy it over the heads of its 
defenders. The Germans have probably by now 
rendered it impregnable, for though in modern 
war it is impossible to defend one's own cities, 
the same does not apply to the enemy. In future, 
forts will presumably be placed at points of 
strategic importance only, and as far as possible 
from towns. 

Passing through the western fortifications, we 
came upon the long bridge of boats which had 
been thrown across the Scheldt. The river is here 
more than a quarter of a mile wide, and the long 
row of sailing barges was most picturesque. The 
roadway was of wooden planks, and only just 
wide enough to allow one vehicle to pass at a time, 
the tall spars of the barges rising on each side. 
It is strange that a city of such wealth as Antwerp 
should not have bridged a river which, after all, 



10 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

is not wider than the Thames. We were told that 
a tunnel was in contemplation. The bridge of 
boats was only a tribute to the necessities of war. 
We did not dream that a fortnight later it would 
be our one hope of escape. 



II 

THE HOSPITAL 

Antwerp is one of the richest cities in Europe, 
and our hospital was placed in its wealthiest 
quarter. The Boulevard Leopold is a magnificent 
avenue, with a wide roadway in the centre flanked 
by broad paths planted with trees. Beyond these, 
again, on each side is a paved road with a tram- 
line, whilst a wide pavement runs along the houses. 
There are many such boulevards in Antwerp, and 
they give to the city an air of spaciousness and 
opulence in striking contrast to the more utili- 
tarian plan of London or of most of our large 
towns. We talk a great deal about fresh air, but 
we are not always ready to pay for it. 

Our hospital occupied one of the largest houses 
on the south-east side. A huge doorway led into 
an outer hall through which the garden was 
directly reached behind the house. On the right- 
hand side of this outer hall a wide flight of steps 
led to inner glass doors and the great central hall 
of the building. As a private house it must have 
been magnificent; as a hospital it was as spacious 

11 



12 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and airy as one could desire. The hall was paved 
with marble, and on either side opened lofty recep- 
tion rooms, whilst in front wide marble staircases 
led to the first floor. This first floor and another 
above it were occupied entirely by wards, each 
containing from six to twelve beds. On the 
ground floor on the right-hand side were two large 
wards, really magnificent rooms, and one smaller, 
all these overlooking the Boulevard. On the left 
were the office, the common room, and the oper- 
ating theatre. Behind the house was a large 
paved courtyard, flanked on the right by a garden 
border and on the left by a wide glass-roofed cor- 
ridor. The house had previously been used as a 
school, and on the opposite side of the courtyard 
was the gymnasium, with dormitories above. 
The gymnasium furnished our dining-hall, whilst 
several of the staff slept in the rooms above. 

It will be seen that the building was in many 
ways well adapted to the needs of a hospital and 
to the accommodation of the large staff required. 
We had in all 150 beds, and a staff of about 50. 
The latter included 8 doctors, 20 nurses, 5 dressers, 
lay assistants, and motor drivers. In addition 
to these there was a kitchen staff of Belgians, 
so that the management of the whole was quite 
a large undertaking, especially in a town where 
ordinary provisions were becoming more and more 



THE HOSPITAL 13 

difficult to obtain. In the later days of the siege, 
when milk was not to be had and the only available 
water was salt, the lot of our housekeeper was 
anything but happy. Providing meals for over 
200 people in a besieged town is no small matter. 
But it was managed somehow, and our cuisine 
was positively astonishing, to which I think we 
largely owe the fact that none of the staff was 
ever ill. Soldiers are not the only people who 
fight on their stomachs. 

The management of the hospital centred in the 
office, and it was so typical of Belgium as to be 
really worth a few words of description. It was 
quite a small room, and it was always crowded. 
Four of us had seats round a table in the centre, 
and at another table in the window sat our Belgian 
secretary, Monsieur Herman, and his two clerks. 
But that was only the beginning of it. All day 
long there was a constant stream of men, women, 
and children pouring into that room, bringing 
letters, asking questions, always talking volubly 
to us and amongst themselves. At first we 
thought that this extraordinary turmoil was due 
to our want of space, but we soon found that it 
was one of the institutions of the country. In 
England an official's room is the very home of 
silence, and is by no means easy of access. If he 
is a high official, a series of ante-rooms is interposed 



14 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

between his sacred person and an inquisitive 
world. But in Belgium everyone walks straight 
in without removing his cigar. The great man 
sits at his desk surrounded by a perfect Babel, 
but he is always polite, always ready to hear what 
you have to say and to do what he can to help. 
He appears to be able to deal with half a dozen 
different problems at the same time without ever 
being ruffled or confused. There is an immense 
amount of talking and shaking of hands, and at 
first the brain of a mere Englishman is apt to 
whirl; but the business is done rapidly and com- 
pletely. Belgium is above all things democratic, 
and our office was a good introduction to it. 

The common room was large and airy, over- 
looking the courtyard, and a few rugs and arm- 
chairs made it a very comfortable place when the 
work of the day was done. Anyone who has 
worked in a hospital will know what a difference 
such a room makes to the work — work that must 
be carried on at all hours of the day or night; nor 
will he need to be told of the constant supply of 
tea and coffee that will be found there. We go 
about telling our patients of the evils of excessive 
tea-drinking, and we set them an example they 
would find it hard to follow. We do not mention 
how often tea and a hot bath have been our sub- 
stitute for a night's sleep. A good common room 



THE HOSPITAL 15 

and an unlimited supply of tea will do much to 
oil the wheels of hospital life. 

But to myself the all-important room was the 
operating theatre, for upon its resources depended 
entirely our opportunities for surgical work. It 
was in every way admirable, and I know plenty 
of hospitals in London whose theatres would not 
bear comparison with ours. Three long windows 
faced the courtyard; there was a great bunch of 
electric lights in the ceiling, and there was a con- 
stant supply of boiling water. What more could 
the heart of surgeon desire ? There were two 
operating tables and an equipment of instruments 
to vie with any in a London hospital. Somebody 
must have been very extravagant over those in- 
struments, I thought as I looked at them; but he 
was right and I was wrong, for there were very few 
of those instruments for which I was not grateful 
before long. The surgery of war is a very different 
thing from the surgery of home. 

The wards were full when we arrived, and I had 
a wonderful opportunity of studying the effects 
of rifle and shell fire. Most of the wounds were 
fortunately slight, but some of them were terrible, 
and, indeed, in some cases it seemed little short of 
miraculous that the men had survived. But on 
every side one saw nothing but cheerful faces, and 
one would never have dreamt what some of those 



16 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

men had gone through. They were all smoking 
cigarettes, laughing, and chatting, as cheery a set 
of fellows as one could meet. You would never 
have suspected that a few days before those same 
men had been carried into the hospital in most 
cases at their last gasp from loss of blood and ex- 
posure, for none but serious cases were admitted. 
The cheeriest man in the place was Be Rasquinet, 
a wounded officer who had been christened " Rag- 
time " for short, and for affection. A week before 
he had been struck by a shell in the left side, and 
a large piece of the shell had gone clean through, 
wounding the kidney behind and the bowel in 
front. That man crawled across several fields, 
a distance of nearly a mile, on his hands and knees, 
dragging with him to a place of safety a wounded 
companion. When from loss of blood he could 
drag him along no longer, he left him under a 
hedge, and dragged himself another half-mile till 
he could get help. When he was brought into the 
hospital, he was so exhausted from pain and loss 
of blood that no one thought that he could live 
for more than a few hours, but by sheer pluck he 
had pulled through. Even now he was desperately 
ill with as horrible a wound as a man could have, 
but nothing was going to depress him. I am 
glad to say that what is known in surgery as a 
short circuit was an immediate success, and when 



THE HOSPITAL 17 

we left him three weeks later in Ghent he was to 
all intents perfectly well. 

There were plenty of other serious cases, some 
of them with ghastly injuries, and many of them 
must have suffered agonizing pain; but they were 
all doing their best to make light of their troubles, 
whilst their gratitude for what was done for them 
was extraordinary. The Belgians are by nature 
a cheerful race, but these were brave men, and we 
felt glad that we had come out to do what we could 
for them. 

But if we give them credit for their courage and 
cheerfulness, we must not forget how largely they 
owed it to the devoted attention — yes, and to 
the courage and cheerfulness — of the nurses. I 
wonder how many of us realize what Britain owes 
to her nurses. We take them as a matter of course, 
we regard nursing as a very suitable profession 
for a woman to take up — if she can find nothing 
better to do; perhaps we may have been ill, and 
we were grateful for a nurse's kindness. But how 
many of us realize all the long years of drudgen^ 
that have given the skill we appreciated, the de- 
votion to her work that has made the British 
nurse what she is ? And how many of us realize 
that we English-speaking nations alone in the 
world have such nurses ? Except in small groups, 
they are unknown in France, Belgium, Germany, 



18 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Russia, or any other country in the world. In no 
other land will women leave homes of ease and 
often of luxury to do work that no servant would 
touch, for wages that no servant would take — 
work for which there will be very little reward 
but the unmeasured gratitude of the very few. 
They stand to-day as an unanswerable proof that 
as nations we have risen higher in the level of 
civilization than any of our neighbours. To their 
influence on medicine and surgery I shall refer 
again. Here I only wish to acknowledge our debt. 
As a mere patient I would rather have a good 
nurse than a good physician, if I were so unfortu- 
nate as to have to make the choice. A surgeon is 
a dangerous fellow, and must be treated with 
respect. But as a rule the physician gives his 
blessing, the surgeon does his operation, but it is 
the nurse who does the work. 



THE DAY'S WORK 

In any hospital at home or abroad there is a large 
amount of routine work, which must be carried 
on in an orderly and systematic manner, and upon 
the thoroughness with which this is done will 
largely depend the effectiveness of the hospital. 
Patients must be fed and washed, beds must be 
made and the wards swept and tidied, wounds 
must be dressed and splints adjusted. In an 
English hospital everything is arranged to facili- 
tate this routine work. Close to every ward is a 
sink-room with an adequate supply of hot and 
cold water, dinner arrives in hot tins from the 
kitchens as if by magic, whilst each ward has its 
own arrangements for preparing the smaller meals. 
The beds are of a convenient height, and there is 
an ample supply of sheets and pillow-cases, and of 
dressing materials of all kinds arranged on tables 
which run noiselessly up and down the wards. 
At home all these things are a matter of course; 
abroad they simply did not exist. Four or five 
gas-rings represented our hot-water supply and 

19 



20 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

our ward-kitchens for our 150 patients, and the 
dinners had to be carried up from the large 
kitchens in the basement. The beds were so low 
as to break one's back, and had iron sides which 
were always in the way; and when we came to 
the end of our sheets — well, we came to the end 
of them, and that was all. In every way the work 
was heavier and more difficult than at home, for 
all our patients were heavy men, and every wound 
was septic, and had, in many cases, to be dressed 
several times a day. Everyone had to work 
hard, sometimes very hard; but as a rule we got 
through the drudgery in the morning, and in the 
afternoon everything was in order, and we should, 
I think, have compared very favourably in appear- 
ance with most hospitals at home. 

But we had to meet one set of conditions which 
would, I think, baffle many hospitals at home. 
Every now and then, without any warning, from 
50 to 100, even in one case 150, wounded would 
be brought to our door. There was no use in put- 
ting up a notice "House Full"; the men were 
wounded and they must be attended to. In such 
a case our arrangement was a simple one: all who 
could walk went straight upstairs, the gravest 
cases went straight to the theatre or waited their 
turn in the great hall, the others were accommo- 
dated on the ground floor. We had a number 



THE DAY'S WORK 21 

of folding beds for emergency, and we had no rules 
as to overcrowding. In the morning the authori- 
ties would clear out as many patients as we wished. 
Sometimes we were hard put to it to find room 
for them all, but we always managed somehow, and 
we never refused admission to a single patient on 
the score of want of room. The authorities soon 
discovered the capacity of the hospital for dealing 
with really serious cases, and as a result our beds 
were crowded with injuries of the gravest kind. 
What appealed to us far more was the appreciation 
of the men themselves. We felt that we had not 
worked in vain when we heard that the soldiers 
in the trenches begged to be taken " a l'Hopital 
Anglais." 

The condition of the men when they reached us 
was often pitiable in the extreme. Most of them 
had been living in the trenches for weeks exposed 
to all kinds of weather, their clothes were often 
sodden and caked with dirt, and the men them- 
selves showed clear traces of exposure and insecure 
sleep. In most cases they had lain in the trenches 
for hours after being wounded, for as a rule it is 
impossible to remove the wounded at once with 
any degree of safety. Indeed, when the fighting 
is at all severe they must lie till dark before it is 
safe for the stretcher-bearers to go for them. 
This was so at Furnes, but at Antwerp we were 



22 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

usually able to get them in within a few hours. 
Even a few hours' delay with a bad wound may be 
a serious matter, and in every serious case our 
attention was first directed to the condition of the 
patient himself and not to his wound. Probably 
he had lost blood, his injury had produced more 
or less shock, he had certainly been lying for 
hours in pain. He had to be got warm, his circu- 
lation had to be restored, he had to be saved from 
pain and protected from further shock. Hot 
bottles, blankets, brandy, and morphia worked 
wonders in a very short time, and one could then 
proceed to deal with wounds. Our patients were 
young and vigorous, and their rate of recovery 
was extraordinary. 

When a rush came we all had to work our 
hardest, and the scenes in any part of the hospital 
required steady nerves; but perhaps the centre 
of interest was the theatre. Here all the worst 
cases were brought — men with ghastly injuries 
from which the most hardened might well turn 
away in horror; men almost dead from loss of 
blood, or, worst of all, with a tiny puncture in 
the wall of the abdomen which looks so innocent, 
but which, in this war at least, means, apart from 
a difficult and dangerous operation, a terrible 
death. With all these we had to deal as rapidly 
and completely as possible, reducing each case to 



THE DAY'S WORK 23 

a form which it would be practicable to nurse, 
where the patient would be free from unnecessary 
pain, and where he would have the greatest 
possible chance of ultimate recovery. Of course, 
all this was done under anaesthesia. What a field 
hospital must have been before the days of anaes- 
thesia is too horrible to contemplate. Even in 
civil hospitals the surgeons must have reached a 
degree of " Kultur " beside which its present 
exponents are mere children. It is not so many 
years since a famous surgeon, who was fond of 
walking back from his work at the London Hos- 
pital along the Whitechapel Road, used to be 
pointed to with horror by the Aldgate butchers, 
whose opinion on such a subject was probably 
worth consideration. But now all that is changed. 
The surgeon can be a human being again, and 
indeed, except when he goes round his wards, his 
patients may never know of his existence. They 
go to sleep in a quiet ante-room, and they waken 
up in the ward. Of the operation and all its 
difficulties they know no more than their friends 
at home. Perhaps even more wonderful is the 
newer method of spinal anaesthesia, which we 
used largely for the difficult abdominal cases. 
With the injection of a minute quantity of fluid 
into the spine all sensation disappears up to the 
level of the arms, and, provided he cannot see 



24 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

what is going on, any operation below that level 
can be carried out without the patient knowing 
anything about it at all. It is rather uncanny 
at first to see a patient lying smoking a cigarette 
and reading the paper whilst on the other side of a 
screen a big operation is in progress. But for 
many cases this method is unsuitable, and without 
chloroform we should indeed have been at a loss. 
The Belgians are an abstemious race, and they 
took it beautifully. I am afraid they were a 
striking contrast to their brothers on this side of 
the water. Chloroform does not mix well with 
alcohol in the human body, and the British 
working man is rather fond of demonstrating 
the fact. 

With surgery on rather bold lines it was extra- 
ordinary how much could be done, especially in 
the way of saving limbs. During the whole of 
our stay in Antwerp we never once had to resort 
to an amputation. We were dealing with healthy 
and vigorous men, and once they had got over 
the shock of injury they had wonderful powers 
of recovery. We very soon found that we were 
dealing with cases to which the ordinary rules of 
surgery did not apply. The fundamental princi- 
ples of the art must always be the same, but here 
the conditions of their application were essentially 
different from those of civil practice. Two of 



THE DAY'S WORK 25 

these conditions were of general interest: the great 
destruction of the tissues in most wounds, and the 
infection of the wounds, which was almost uni- 
versal. 

Where a wound has been produced by a large 
fragment of shell, one expects to see considerable 
damage; in fact, a whole limb may be torn off, 
or death may be instant from some terrible injury 
to the body. But where the object of the enemy 
is the injury of individuals, and not the destruction 
of buildings, they often use shrapnel, and the 
resulting wounds resemble those from the old 
smooth-bore guns of our ancestors. Shrapnel 
consists of a large number of bullets about half an 
inch in diameter packed together in a case, which 
carries also a charge of explosive timed to burst 
at the moment when it reaches its object. The 
balls are small and round, and if they go straight 
through soft tissues they do not do much damage. 
If, however, they strike a bone, they are so soft 
that their shape becomes irregular, and the injury 
they can produce in their further course is almost 
without limit. On the whole, they do not as a rule 
produce great damage, for in many cases they are 
nearly spent when they reach their mark. Pieces 
of the case will, of course, have much the same 
effect as an ordinary shell. 

The effects of rifle- fire, particularly at short 



26 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

ranges, have led to a great deal of discussion, and 
each side has accused the other of using dum- 
dum bullets. The ordinary bullet consists of a 
lead core with a casing of nickel, since the soft 
lead would soon choke rifling. Such a bullet 
under ordinary circumstances makes a clean per- 
foration, piercing the soft tissues, and sometimes 
the bones, with very little damage. In a dum- 
dum bullet the casing at the tip is cut or re- 
moved, with the result that, on striking, the casing 
spreads out and forms a rough, irregular missile, 
which does terrific damage. Such bullets were 
forbidden by the Geneva Convention. But the 
German bullet is much more subtle than this. It 
is short and pointed, and when it strikes it turns 
completely over and goes through backwards. 
The base of the bullet has no cover, and conse- 
quently spreads in a manner precisely similar 
to that in a dum-dum, with equally deadly 
results. There could be no greater contrast than 
that between the wounds with which we had to 
deal in South Africa, produced by ordinary 
bullets, and those which our soldiers are now 
receiving from German rifles. The former were 
often so slight that it was quite a common 
occurrence for a soldier to discover accidentally 
that he had been wounded some time pre- 
viously. In the present war rifle wounds have 



THE DAY'S WORK 27 

been amongst the most deadly with which we 
have had to deal. 

It will thus be seen that in most cases the 
wounds were anything but clean-cut; with very 
few exceptions, they were never surgically clean. 
By surgically clean we mean that no bacteria 
are present which can interfere with the healing 
of the tissues, and only those who are familiar 
with surgical work can realize the importance 
of this condition. Its maintenance is implied 
in the term " aseptic surgery," and upon this 
depends the whole distinction between the surgery 
of the present and the surgery of the past. With- 
out it the great advances of modern surgery 
would be entirely impossible. When we say, 
then, that every wound with which we had to deal 
was infected with bacteria, it will be realized how 
different were the problems which we had to face 
compared with those of work at home. But the 
difference was even more striking, for the bacteria 
which had infected the wounds were not those 
commonly met with in England. These wounds 
were for the most part received in the open 
country, and they were soiled by earth, manure, 
fragments of cloth covered with mud. They were 
therefore infected by the organisms which flourish 
on such soil, and not by the far more deadly 
denizens of our great cities. It is true that in 



28 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

soil one may meet with tetanus and other virulent 
bacteria, but in our experience these were rare. 
Now, there is one way in which all such infections 
may be defeated — by plenty of fresh air, or, better 
still, by oxygen. We had some very striking 
proofs of this, for in several cases the wounds were 
so horribly foul that it was impossible to tolerate 
their presence in the wards ; and in these cases we 
made it a practice to put the patient in the open 
air, of course suitably protected, and to leave the 
wound exposed to the winds of heaven, with only 
a thin piece of gauze to protect it. The results 
were almost magical, for in two or three days the 
wounds lost their odour and began to look clean, 
whilst the patients lost all signs of the poisoning 
which had been so marked before. It may be 
partly to this that we owe the fact that we never 
had a case of tetanus. In all cases we treated our 
wounds with solutions of oxygen, and we avoided 
covering them up with heavy dressings; and we 
found that this plan was successful as well as 
economical. 

Though any detailed description of surgical 
treatment would be out of place, there was one 
which in these surroundings was novel, and which 
was perhaps of general interest. Amongst all the 
cases which came to us, certainly the most awk- 
ward were the fractured thighs. It was not a 



THE DAY'S WORK 29 

question of a broken leg in the ordinary sense of 
the term. In every case there was a large in- 
fected wound to deal with, and as a rule several 
inches of the bone had been blown clean away. 
At first we regarded these cases with horror, for 
anything more hopeless than a thigh with 6 inches 
missing it is difficult to imagine. Splints pre- 
sented almost insuperable difficulties, for the 
wounds had to be dressed two or three times, and 
however skilfully the splint was arranged, the least 
movement meant for the patient unendurable 
agony. After some hesitation we attempted the 
method of fixation by means of steel plates, which 
was introduced with such success by Sir Arbuthnot 
Lane in the case of simple fractures. The missing 
portion of the bone is replaced by a long steel 
plate, screwed by means of small steel screws to 
the portions which remain, " demonstrating," as 
a colleague put it, " the triumph of mind over the 
absence of matter." The result was a brilliant 
success, for not only could the limb now be handled 
as if there were no fracture at all, to the infinite 
comfort of the patient, but the wounds themselves 
cleared up with great rapidity. We were told 
that the plates would break loose, that the screws 
would come out, that the patient would come to a 
bad end through the violent sepsis induced by the 
presence of a " foreign body " in the shape of the 



30 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

steel plate. But none of these disasters happened, 
the cases did extremely well, and one of our most 
indignant critics returned to his own hospital 
after seeing them with his pockets full of plates. 
The only difficulty with some of them was to 
induce them to stop in bed, and it is a fact that 
on the night of our bombardment I met one of 
them walking downstairs, leaning on a dresser's 
arm, ten days after the operation. 

And this brings me to a subject on which I feel 
very strongly, the folly of removing bullets. If a 
bullet is doing any harm, pressing on some nerve, 
interfering with a joint, or in any way causing 
pain or inconvenience, by all means let it be 
removed, though even then it should in most 
cases never be touched until the wound is com- 
pletely healed. But the mere presence of a bullet 
inside the body will of itself do no harm at all. 
The old idea that it will cause infection died long 
ago. It may have brought infection with it; but 
the removal of the bullet will not remove the 
infection, but rather in most cases make it fire up. 
We now know that, provided they are clean, we 
can introduce steel plates, silver wires, silver nets, 
into the body without causing any trouble at all, 
and a bullet is no worse than any of these. It is 
a matter in which the public are very largely to 
blame, for they consider that unless the bullet 



THE DAY'S WORK 31 

has been removed the surgeon has not done his 
job. Unless he has some specific reason for it, 
I know that the surgeon who removes a bullet 
does not know his work. It may be the mark of 
a Scotch ancestry, but if I ever get a bullet in my 
own anatomy, I shall keep it. 



IV 

ANTWERP 

There is no port in Europe which holds such a 
dominant position as Antwerp, and there is none 
whose history has involved such amazing changes 
of fortune. In the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury she was the foremost city in Europe, at its 
close she was ruined. For two hundred years she 
lay prostrate under the blighting influence of 
Spain and Austria, and throttled by the com- 
mercial jealousy of England and Holland. A few 
weeks ago she was the foremost port on the Con- 
tinent, the third in the world; now her wharves 
stand idle, and she herself is a prisoner in the 
hands of the enemy. Who can tell what the next 
turn of the wheel will bring ? 

Placed centrally between north and south, on a 
deep and wide river, Antwerp is the natural outlet 
of Central Europe towards the West, and it is no 
wonder that four hundred years ago she gathered 
to herself the commerce of the Netherlands, in 
which Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent had been her 
forerunners. For fifty years she was the Queen 

32 



ANTWERP 33 

of the North, and the centre of a vast ocean trade 
with England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 
till the religious bigotry of Philip II. of Spain and 
the awful scenes of the Spanish Fury reduced her 
to ruin. For two hundred years the Scheldt was 
blocked by Holland, and the ocean trade of Ant- 
werp obliterated. Her population disappeared, 
her wharves rotted, and her canals were choked 
with mud. It is hard to apportion the share of 
wickedness between a monarch who destroys men 
and women to satisfy his own religious lust, and 
a nation which drains the life-blood of another to 
satisfy its lust for gold. One wonders in what 
category the instigator of the present war should 
appear. 

At the very beginning of last century Napoleon 
visited Antwerp, and asserted that it was " little 
better than a heap of ruins." He recognized its 
incomparable position as a port and as a fortress, 
and he determined to raise it to its former pros- 
perity, and to make it the strongest fortress in 
Europe. He spent large sums of money upon it, 
and his refusal to part with Antwerp is said to 
have broken off the negotiations of Chatillon, and 
to have been the chief cause of his exile to St. 
Helena. Alas ! his enemies did not profit by his 
genius. We are the allies of his armies now, but 
we have lost Antwerp. Germany will be utterly 

3 



34 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and completely crushed before she parts with that 
incomparable prize. A mere glance at the map 
of Europe is sufficient to convince anyone that in 
a war between England and Germany it is a point 
of the first strategical importance. That our 
access to it should be hampered by the control of 
Holland over the Scheldt is one of the eccen- 
tricities of diplomacy which are unintelligible to 
the plain man. The blame for its loss must rest 
equally between Britain and Belgium, for Belgium, 
the richest country in Europe for her size, at- 
tempted to defend her greatest stronghold with 
obsolete guns; whilst we, who claim the mastery 
of the seas, sacrificed the greatest seaport in 
Europe to the arrangements of an obsolete diplo- 
macy. If we are to retain our great position on 
the seas, Antwerp must be regained. She is the 
European outpost of Britain, and, as has so often 
been pointed out, the mouth of the Scheldt is 
opposite to the mouth of the Thames. 

In Antwerp, as we saw her, it was almost im- 
possible to realize the vicissitudes through which 
she had passed, or to remember that her present 
prosperity was of little more than fifty years' 
growth. On all sides we were surrounded by wide 
boulevards, lined by magnificent houses and public 
buildings. There are few streets in Europe to 
eclipse the great Avenue des Arts, which, with its 



ANTWERP 35 

continuations, extends the whole length of the 
city from north to south. The theatres, the 
Central Station, the banks, would adorn any city, 
and the shops everywhere spoke of a wealth not 
restricted to the few. The wide streets, the trees, 
the roomy white houses, many of them great 
palaces, made a deep impression upon us after 
the darkness and dirt of London. Even in the 
poorer quarters there was plenty of light and air, 
and on no occasion did we find the slums which 
surround the wealthiest streets all over London. 
In the older parts of the city the streets were, of 
course, narrower; but even here one had the com- 
pensation of wonderful bits of architecture at un- 
expected corners, splendid relics of an illustrious 
past. They are only remnants, but they speak of 
a time when men worked for love rather than for 
wages, and when an artisan took a pride in the 
labour of his hands. If it had not been for the 
hand of the destroyer, what a marvellous city 
Antwerp would have been ! One likes to think 
that the great creations of the past are not all 
lost, and that in the land to which the souls 
of the Masters have passed we may find still 
living the mighty thoughts to which their love 
gave birth. Are our cathedrals only stones 
and mortar, and are our paintings only dust and 
oil ? 



36 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

The inhabitants of Antwerp were as delightful 
as their city. On all sides we were welcomed with 
a kindness and a consideration not always accorded 
to those who are so bold as to wish to help their 
fellow-men. Everywhere we met with a courtesy 
and a generosity by which, in the tragedy of their 
country, we were deeply touched. They all 
seemed genuinely delighted to see us, from the 
Queen herself to the children in the streets. Our 
medical confreres treated us royally, and the mere 
thought of professional jealousy with such men is 
simply ludicrous. They constantly visited our 
hospital, and they always showed the keenest 
interest in our work and in any novelties in treat- 
ment we were able to show them; and when we 
went to see them, we were shown all the best that 
they had, and we brought away many an ingenious 
idea which it was worth while going far to obtain. 
Wherever we moved amongst the Belgians, we 
always found the same simplicity of purpose, 
the same generosity of impulse. Everywhere 
we met the same gratitude for what England 
was doing for Belgium; no one ever referred 
to the sacrifices which Belgium has made for 
England. 

The one thing which so impressed us in the 
character of the Belgians whom we met was its 
simplicity, and the men who had risen to high 



ANTWERP 37 

rank did not seem to have lost it in their climb to 
fame. But it was just this, the most delightful of 
their characteristics, which must have made war 
for them supremely difficult. For strict discipline 
and simplicity are almost incompatible. None of 
us tower so far above our fellows that we can 
command instant obedience for our own sakes. 
We have to cover ourselves with gold lace, to 
entrench ourselves in rank, and to provide our- 
selves with all sorts of artificial aids before we can 
rely on being obeyed. These things are foreign 
to the Belgian mind, and as a result one noticed 
in their soldiers a certain lack of the stern disci- 
pline which war demands. Individually they are 
brave men and magnificent fighters. They only 
lacked the organization which has made the little 
British Army the envy of the world. The fact is 
that they are in no sense a warlike nation, in spite 
of their turbulent history of the past, and, indeed, 
few things could be more incompatible than turbu- 
lence and modern warfare. It demands on the 
part of the masses of combatants an obedience 
and a disregard of life which are repellent to 
human nature, and the Belgians are above all 
things human. Germany is governed by soldiers, 
and France by officials. Unlike the frogs in the 
fable, the Belgians are content to govern them- 
selves. 



38 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

It was our great regret that we had so little 
time in which to see the work of the Antwerp 
hospitals, but we made use of what opportunities 
we had. There are many of them, and those we 
saw were magnificent buildings, equipped in a 
way which filled us with envy. The great city 
hospital, the Stuivenberg, was a model of what a 
modern hospital ought to be. The wards were 
large and airy and spotlessly clean, and the nurses 
seemed to be extremely competent. The kitchens 
were equipped with all the latest appliances, steam 
boilers, and gas and electric cookers. But the 
show part of the hospital was the suite of operating 
theatres. I have always felt the pardonable pride 
of a son in the theatres of the London Hospital, 
but they were certainly eclipsed here. Each 
theatre was equipped with its own anesthetizing 
room, its own surgeon's room, and its own steril- 
izing rooms and stores, all furnished with a lavish- 
ness beyond the financial capacity of any hospital 
in London. Perhaps some of the equipment was 
unnecessary, but it was abundantly evident that 
the State appreciated the value of first-class sur- 
gery, and that it was prepared to pay for it. I 
have never heard the same accusation levelled at 
Great Britain. 

At St. Camille we had the good fortune to see 
M. Lambotte at work. His reputation as a sur- 



ANTWERP 39 

geon is worldwide, and it was pleasant to find that 
his dexterity as an operator was equal to his repu- 
tation. It is not always the case. He is an ex- 
pert mechanic, and himself makes most of the very 
ingenious instruments which he uses. He was 
fixing a fractured femur with silver wires, and one 
could see the skilled workman in all that he did. 
There is no training- ground for one's hands like 
a carpenter's bench, and the embryo surgeon 
might do much worse with his time than spend 
six months of it in a workshop. When medical 
training emerges from its medieval traditions, 
manual training will certainly form a part, and 
no one will be allowed to attempt to mend a bone 
till he has shown his capacity to mend a chair-leg. 
Here, again, the surgeon was surrounded by all 
the appliances, and even the luxuries, that he 
could desire. The lot of the great surgeon abroad 
is indeed a happy one. 

But there is one thing in which we in England 
are far better off — in our nursing staffs. In most 
of the hospitals we visited the nursing was carried 
on by Sisterhoods, and though some of them were 
evidently good nurses, most of them had no idea 
whatever of nursing as it is practised in our 
country. Fresh air, for example, is to them full 
of dangers. One would almost think that it 
savoured of the powers of evil. We went into 



40 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

one huge hospital of the most modern type, and 
equipped lavishly, and such was the atmosphere 
that in ten minutes I had to make a rush for the 
door. One large ward was full of wounded 
soldiers, many of them with terrible wounds, 
gangrenous and horrible, and every window was 
tightly shut. How they could live in such an 
atmosphere is beyond my comprehension, but the 
Sisters did not seem to notice it at all. 

Some of the surgeons have their specially trained 
nurses, but nursing as a profession for the classes 
who are alone competent to undertake it is a con- 
ception which has yet to dawn upon the Continent, 
for only a woman of education and refinement can 
really be a nurse. 

The absence on the Continent of a nursing pro- 
fession such as ours is not without its influence 
on medicine and surgery abroad. The individual 
patient meets with far less consideration than 
would be the case in this country, and is apt to be 
regarded as so much raw material. In Belgium 
this tendency is counteracted by the natural 
kindliness of the Belgian, but in other countries 
patients are often treated with a callousness 
which is amazing. There is in many of the great 
clinics a disregard of the patient's feelings, of his 
sufferings, and even of his life, which would be 
impossible in an English hospital. The contact 



ANTWERP 41 

of a surgeon with his hospital patients as indi- 
viduals is largely through the nursing staff, and 
his point of view will be largely influenced by 
them. There is no one in our profession, from 
the youngest dresser to the oldest physician, who 
does not owe a great part of his education to 
Sister. 



V 

TERMONDE 

Anyone who has worked in hospitals will realize 
how important it is for the health of the staff, 
nurses and doctors, that they should get out into 
the fresh air for at least some part of every day. 
It is still more necessary in a war hospital, for not 
only is the work more exacting, but the cases 
themselves involve certain risks which can only 
be safely taken in perfect health. Practically every 
one is septic, and to anyone in the least run down 
the danger of infection is considerable ; and infec- 
tion with some of the organisms with which one 
meets in war is a very serious thing indeed. We 
had four large motors in Antwerp belonging to the 
members of our hospital, and always at its service, 
and every afternoon parties were made up to 
drive out into the country. As a rule calls were 
made at various Croix Rouge posts on the way, 
and in that way we kept in contact with the 
medical service of the army in the field, and gave 
them what help we could. We were always pro- 
vided with the password, and the whole country 

42 



TERMONDE 43 

was open to us — a privilege we very greatly appre- 
ciated; for after a hard morning's work in the 
wards there are few things more delightful than 
a motor drive. And it gave us an opportunity of 
seeing war as very few but staff officers ever can 
see it. We learnt more about the condition of the 
country and of the results of German methods in 
one afternoon than all the literature in the world 
could ever teach. If only it were possible to 
bring home to the people of Britain one-hundredth 
part of what we saw with our own eyes, stringent 
laws would have to be passed to stop men and 
women from enlisting. No man who deserved the 
name of man, and no woman who deserved to be 
the mother of a child, would rest day or night till 
the earth had been freed from the fiends who have 
ravaged Belgium and made the name of German 
vile. 

One afternoon towards the end of September 
we visited Termonde. We heard that the Ger- 
mans, having burnt the town, had retired, leaving 
it in the hands of the Belgian troops. It was a 
rare opportunity to see the handiwork of the 
enemy at close quarters, and we did not wish to 
miss it. Termonde is about twenty-two miles 
from Antwerp, and a powerful car made short 
work of the distance. Starting directly south- 
wards through Boom, we reached Willebroeck and 



44 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

the road which runs east and west from Malines 
through Termonde to Ghent, and along it we 
turned to the right. We were now running parallel 
to the German lines, which at some points were 
only a couple of miles away on the other side 
of the Termonde-Malines railway. We passed 
numerous Belgian outposts along the road, and 
for a few miles between Lippeloo and Baesrode 
they begged us to travel as fast as possible, as at 
this point we came within a mile of the railway. 
We did travel, and it would have taken a smart 
marksman to hit us at fifty miles an hour ; but we 
felt much happier when we passed under the 
railway bridge of a loop line at Briel and placed 
it between ourselves and the enemy. The en- 
trance to Termonde was blocked by a rough barri- 
cade of bricks and branches guarded by a squad 
of soldiers. They told us that no one was allowed 
to pass, and we were about to return disappointed, 
when one of us happened to mention the password. 
As without it we could not possibly have got so 
far, it had never occurred to us that they might 
think we had not got it; and as we had no possible 
business in the town, we had no arguments to 
oppose to their refusal to let us in. However, all 
was now open to us, and the cheery fellows ran 
forward to remove the barrier they had put up. 
Termonde is, or rather was, a well-to-do town 



TERMONDE 45 

of 10,000 inhabitants lying on the Scheldt at the 
point where the Dendre, coming up from the 
south, runs into it. A river in Belgium means a 
route for traffic, and the town must have derived 
some advantage from its position as a trade junc- 
tion. But it possesses an even greater one in the 
bridge which here crosses the Scheldt, the first road 
bridge above the mouth of the river, for there is 
none at Antwerp. At least six main roads con- 
verge upon this bridge, and they must have 
brought a great deal of traffic through the town. 
When we mention that a corresponding number 
of railways meet at the same spot, it will be seen 
that Termonde was an important centre, and that 
it must have been a wealthy town. The Dendre 
runs right through the centre of the town to the 
point where it joins the Scheldt, and on each side 
runs a long stone quay planted with trees, with old- 
fashioned houses facing the river. With the little 
wooden bridges and the barges on the river it must 
have been a very pretty picture. Now it was 
little better than a heap of ruins. 

The destruction of the town was extraordinarily 
complete, and evidently carefully organized. The 
whole thing had been arranged beforehand at 
headquarters, and these particular troops supplied 
with special incendiary apparatus. There is 
strong evidence to show that the destruction of 



46 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Louvain, Termonde, and of several smaller towns, 
was all part of a definite plan of " f rightfulness," 
the real object being to terrorize Holland and 
Denmark, and to prevent any possibility of their 
joining with the Allies. It is strictly scientific 
warfare, it produces a strictly scientific hell upon 
this world, and I think that one may have every 
reasonable hope that it leads to a strictly scientific 
hell in the next. After a town has been shelled, 
its occupants driven out, and its buildings to a 
large extent broken down, the soldiers enter, each 
provided with a number of incendiary bombs, 
filled with a very inflammable compound. They 
set light to these and throw them into the houses, 
and in a very few minutes each house is blazing. 
In half an hour the town is a roaring furnace, and 
by the next day nothing is left but the bare walls. 
And that is almost all that there was left of Ter- 
monde. We walked along the quay beside a row 
of charred and blackened ruins, a twisted iron 
bedstead or a battered lamp being all there was 
to tell of the homes which these had been. A few 
houses were still standing untouched, and on the 
door of each of these was scrawled in chalk the 
inscription : 

" Gutb Leute, 

" Nicht Anzunden, 

" Breiteuss, Lt" 




I : 



TERMONDE 47 

One wondered at what cost the approval of 
Lieutenant Breitfuss had been obtained. His 
request to the soldiers not to set fire to the houses 
of these " good people " had been respected, but 
I think that if the Belgians ever return to Ter- 
monde those houses are likely to be empty. There 
are things worse than having your house burnt 
down, and one would be to win the approval of 
Lieutenant Breitfuss. 

We crossed the Dendre and wandered up the 
town towards the Square. For a few moments I 
stood alone in a long curving street with not a soul 
in sight, and the utter desolation of the whole 
thing made me shiver. Houses, shops, banks, 
churches, all gutted by the flames and destroyed. 
The smell of burning from the smouldering ruins 
was sickening. Every now and then the silence 
was broken by the fall of bricks or plaster. Except 
a very few houses with that ominous inscription on 
their doors, there was nothing left ; everything was 
destroyed. A little farther on I went into the 
remains of a large factory equipped with elaborate 
machinery, but so complete was the destruction 
that I could not discover what had been made 
there. There was a large gas engine and extensive 
shafting, all hanging in dismal chaos, and I recog- 
nized the remains of machines for making tin 
boxes, in which the products of the factory had, 



48 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

I suppose, been packed. A large pile of glass 
stoppers in one corner was fused up into a solid 
mass, and I chipped a bit off as a memento. 

In the Square in front of the church of Notre 
Dame the German soldiers had evidently cele- 
brated their achievement by a revel. In the 
centre were the remains of a bonfire, and all around 
were broken bottles and packs of cheap cards in 
confusion. Think of the scene. A blazing town 
around them, and every now and then the crash 
of falling buildings; behind them Notre Dame in 
flames towering up to heaven; the ancient Town 
Hall and the Guard House burning across the 
Square; and in the centre a crowd of drunken 
soldiers round a bonfire, playing cards. And 
miles away across the fields ten thousand homeless 
wanderers watching the destruction of all for 
which they had spent their lives in toil. 

Of the ancient church of Notre Dame only the 
walls remained. The roof had fallen, all the wood- 
work had perished in the flames, and the stone- 
work was calcined by the heat. Above the arch 
of a door was a little row of angels' heads carved 
in stone, but when we touched them they fell to 
powder. The heat inside must have been terrific, 
for all the features of the church had disappeared, 
and we were surrounded by merely a mass of 
debris. In the apse a few fragments of old gold 



TERMONDE 49 

brocade buried beneath masses of brick and mortar 
were all that remained to show where the altar 
had been. 

The Town Hall was once a beautiful gabled 
building with a tall square tower ending in four 
little turrets. I have a drawing of it, and it must 
have formed quite a pleasing picture, the entrance 
reached by the double flight of steps of which 
Belgium is so fond, and from which public 
proclamations were read. It had been only 
recently restored, and it was now to all intents 
and purposes a heap of smoking bricks. The 
upper part of the tower had fallen into the roof, 
and the whole place was burnt out. 

But no words can ever convey any idea of the 
utter destruction of the whole town, or of the 
awful loneliness by which one was surrounded. 
One felt that one was in the presence of wicked- 
ness such as the world has rarely seen, that the 
powers of darkness were very near, and that behind 
those blackened walls there lurked evil forms. 
Twilight was coming on as we turned back to our 
car, and a cold mist was slowly rising from the 
river. I am not superstitious, and in broad day- 
light I will scoff at ghosts with anyone, but I 
should not care to spend a night alone in Ter- 
monde. One could almost hear the Devil laughing 
at the handiwork of his children. 

4 



VI 

THE CHATEAU 

One of the most astounding features of the war 
is the way in which the Germans, from the highest 
to the lowest, have given themselves up to loot. 
In all previous wars between civilized countries 
anything in the nature of loot has been checked 
with a stern hand, and there are cases on record 
when a soldier has been shot for stealing a pair of 
boots. But now the Crown Prince of the German 
Empire sends back to his palaces all the loot that 
he can collect, on innumerable transport waggons, 
amid the applause of his proud father's subjects. 
He is of course carrying out the new gospel of the 
Fatherland that everyone has a perfect right to 
whatever he is strong enough to take. But some 
day that doctrine may spread from the exalted 
and sacred circle in which it is now the guiding 
star to the " cannon fodder." Some day the 
common people will have learnt the lesson which 
is being so sedulously taught to them both by 
example and by precept, and then the day of 
reckoning will have come. 

60 



THE CHATEAU 51 

Loot and destruction have always gone hand in 
hand. The private soldier cannot carry loot, and 
it is one of the most primitive instincts of animal 
nature to destroy rather than to leave that by 
which others may profit. Even the pavement 
artist will destroy his work rather than allow 
some poor wretch to sit beside his pictures and 
collect an alms. And there is great joy in destroy- 
ing that which men are too coarse to appreciate, 
in feeling that they have in their power that 
which, something tells them, belongs to a refine- 
ment they cannot attain. That was the keynote 
of the excesses of the French Revolution, for 
nothing arouses the fury of the unclean so much as 
cleanliness, and a man has been killed before now 
for daring to wash his hands. And it is this ele- 
mental love of destroying that has raged through 
Belgium in the last few months, for though de- 
struction has been the policy of their commanders, 
the German soldier has done it for love. No order 
could ever comprehend the ingenious detail of 
much that we saw, for it bore at every turn the 
marks of individuality. It is interesting to ponder 
on a future Germany of which these men, or rather 
these wild beasts, will be the sons. Germany has 
destroyed more than the cities of Belgium ; she has 
destroyed her own soul. 

It is not in the ruined towns or the battered 



52 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

cathedrals of Belgium that one sees most clearly 
the wholehearted way in which the German 
soldiers have carried out the commands of their 
lord and made his desires their own. Louvain, 
Termonde, Dinant, and a hundred other towns 
have been uprooted by order. If you wish to see 
what the German soldier can do for love, you have 
to visit the chateaux which are dotted so thickly 
all over the Belgian countryside. Here he has had 
a free hand, and the destruction he wrought had 
no political object and served no mere utilitarian 
purpose. It was the work of pure affection, and 
it showed Germany at her best. One would like 
to have brought one of those chateaux over to 
England, to be kept for all time as an example of 
German culture, that our children might turn 
from it in horror, and that our country might be 
saved from the hypocrisy and the selfishness of 
which this is the fruit. 

Among our many good friends in Antwerp 
there were few whom we valued more than the 
Baron d'O. He was always ready to undertake 
any service for us, from the most difficult to the 
most trivial. A man of birth and of fortune, he 
stood high in the service of the Belgian Govern- 
ment, and he was often able to do much to facili- 
tate our arrangements with them. So when he 
asked us to take him out in one of our cars to see 



THE CHATEAU 53 

the chateau of one of his greatest friends, we were 
glad to be in a position to repay him in a small 
way for his kindness. The chateau had been 
occupied by the Germans, who had now retired — 
though only temporarily, alas ! — and he was 
anxious to see what damage had been done and 
to make arrangements for putting it in order 
again if it should be possible. 

A perfect autumn afternoon found us tearing 
southwards on the road to Boom in Mrs. W.'s 
powerful Minerva. We were going to a point 
rather close to the German lines, and our safety 
might depend on a fast car and a cool hand on the 
wheel. We had both, for though the hand was 
a lady's, its owner had earned the reputation of 
being the most dangerous and the safest driver 
in Antwerp, and that is no mean achievement. 
We called, as was our custom, at the Croix Rouge 
stations we passed, and at one of them we were 
told that there were some wounded in Termonde, 
and that, as the Germans were attacking it, they 
were in great danger. So we turned off to the 
right, and jolted for the next twenty minutes over 
a deplorable paved road. 

The roar of artillery fire gradually grew louder 
and louder, and we were soon watching an inter- 
esting little duel between the forts of Termonde, 
under whose shelter we were creeping along, on 



54 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

the one side, and the Germans on the other. The 
latter were endeavouring to destroy one of the 
bridges which span the Scheldt at this point, one 
for the railway and one for the road; but so far 
they had not succeeded in hitting either. It was 
a week since our last visit to Termonde, and it 
seemed even more desolate and forsaken than 
before. The Germans had shelled it again, and 
most of the remaining walls had been knocked 
down, so that the streets were blocked at many 
points and the whole town was little more than a 
heap of bricks and mortar. There was not a living 
creature to be seen, and even the birds had gone. 
The only sound that broke the utter silence was 
the shriek of the shells and the crash of their 
explosion. We were constantly checked by piles 
of fallen debris, and from one street we had to 
back the car out and go round by another way. 
At the end of a long street of ruined houses, many 
bearing the inscription of some braggart, " I did 
this," we found our wounded men. They were 
in a monastery near the bridge at which the 
Germans were directing their shells, several of 
which had already fallen into the building. There 
had been four wounded men there, but two of 
them, badly hurt, were so terrified at the bom- 
bardment that they had crawled away in the 
night. The priest thought that they were prob- 



THE CHATEAU 55 

ably dead. Think of the poor wounded wretches, 
unable to stand, crawling away in the darkness to 
find some spot where they could die in peace. 
Two remained, and these we took with us on the 
car. The priest and the two nuns, the sole occu- 
pants of the monastery, absolutely refused to 
leave. They wished to protect the monastery 
from sacrilege, and m that cause they held their 
lives of small account. I have often thought of 
those gentle nuns and the fearless priest standing 
in the doorway as our car moved away. I hope 
that it went well with them, and that they did not 
stay at their post in vain. 

By the bridge stood a company of Belgian 
soldiers, on guard in case, under cover of the fire 
of their artillery, the Germans might attempt to 
capture it. There was very little shelter for them, 
and it was positively raining shells; but they had 
been told to hold the bridge, and they did so until 
there was no longer a bridge to hold. It was as 
fine a piece of quiet heroism as I shall ever see, 
and it was typical of the Belgian soldier wherever 
we saw him. They never made any fuss about 
it, they were always quiet and self-contained, 
and always cheerful. But if they were given a 
position to hold, they held it. And that is the 
secret of the wonderful losing battle they have 
fought across Belgium. Some day they will 



56 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

advance and not retreat, and then I think that 
the Belgian Army will astonish their opponents, 
and perhaps their friends too. 

We were soon out of Termonde and on the open 
road again, to our very great relief, and at the 
nearest dressing-station we handed over our 
patients, who were not badly wounded, to the 
surgeon, who was hard at work in a little cottage 
about a mile back along the road. We drove on 
due east, and forty minutes later found ourselves 
at the entrance of the lodge of our friend's house. 
It lay on the very edge of the Belgian front, and 
would have been unapproachable had there been 
any activity in this section of the line. Fortu- 
nately for us, the Germans were concentrating 
their energies around Termonde, and the mitrail- 
leuse standing on the path amongst the trees at 
the end of the garden seemed to have gone asleep. 
We turned the car in the drive, and, in case 
things should happen, pointed its nose home- 
wards. That is always a wise precaution, for 
turning a car under fire in a narrow road is one 
of the most trying experiences imaginable. The 
coolest hand may fumble with the gears at such 
a moment, and it is surprising how difficult it is 
to work them neatly when every second may be 
a matter of life or death, when a stopped engine 
may settle the fate of everyone in the car. It is 



THE CHATEAU 57 

foolish to take unnecessary risks, and we left the 
car pointing the right way, with its engine running, 
ready to start on the instant, while we went to 
have a look at the house. 

It was a large country-house standing in well- 
timbered grounds, evidently the home of a man 
of wealth and taste. The front-door stood wide 
open, as if inviting us to enter, and as we passed 
into the large hall I could not help glancing at our 
friend's face to see what he was thinking as the 
obvious destruction met us on the very threshold. 
So thorough was it that it was impossible to believe 
that it had not been carried out under definite 
orders. Chairs, sofas, settees lay scattered about 
in every conceivable attitude, and in every case 
as far as I can recollect minus legs and backs. 
In a small room at the end of the hall a table had 
been overturned, and on the floor and around lay 
broken glass, crockery, knives and forks, mixed 
up in utter confusion, while the wall was freely 
splashed with ink. One fact was very striking 
and very suggestive: none of the pictures had been 
defaced, and there were many fine oil-paintings 
and engravings hanging on the walls of the recep- 
tion-rooms. After the destruction of the treasures 
of Louvain, it is absurd to imagine that the con- 
trolling motive could have been any reverence 
for works of art. The explanation was obvious 



58 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

enough. The pictures were of value, and were the 
loot of some superior officer. A large cabinet had 
evidently been smashed with the butt-end of a 
musket, but the beautiful china it contained was 
intact. The grand piano stood uninjured, pre- 
sumably because it afforded entertainment. The 
floor was thick with playing cards. 

But it was upstairs that real chaos reigned. 
Every wardrobe and receptacle had been burst 
open and the contents dragged out. Piles of 
dresses and clothing of every kind lay heaped upon 
the floor, many of them torn, as though the harsh 
note produced by the mere act of tearing appealed 
to the passion for destruction which seemed to 
animate these fighting men. In the housekeeper's 
room a sewing-machine stood on the table, its 
needle threaded, and a strip of cloth in position, 
waiting for the stitch it was destined never to 
receive. There were many other things to which 
one cannot refer, but it would have been better 
to have had one's house occupied by a crowd of 
wild beasts than by these apostles of culture. 

Our friend had said very little while we walked 
through the deserted rooms in this splendid 
country-house in which he had so often stayed. 
Inside the house he could not speak, and it was not 
until we got out into the sunshine that he could 
relieve his overwrought feelings. Deep and bitter 



THE CHATEAU 59 

were the curses which he poured upon those 
vandals; but I stood beside him, and I did not 
hear half that he said, for my eyes were fixed on 
the mitrailleuse standing on the garden path 
under the trees. My fingers itched to pull the 
lever and to scatter withering death among them. 
It slowly came into my mind how good it would 
be to kill these defilers. I suppose that some- 
where deep down in us there remains an elemental 
lust for blood, and though in the protected lives 
we live it rarely sees the light, when the bonds of 
civilization are broken it rises up and dominates. 
And who shall say that it is not right ? There 
are things in Belgium for which blood alone can 
atone. Woe to us if when our interests are satis- 
fied we sheath the sword, and forget the ruined 
homes, the murdered children of Belgium, the 
desecrated altars of the God in whose name we 
fight ! He has placed the sword in our hands for 
vengeance, and not for peace. 

I no longer wonder at the dogged courage of the 
Belgian soldiers, at their stead}^ disregard of their 
lives, when I think of the many such pictures of 
wanton outrage which are burned into their 
memories, and which can never be effaced so long 
as a single German remains in their beloved land. 
I no longer wonder, but I do not cease to admire. 
Let anyone who from the depths of an armchair 



60 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

at home thinks that I have spoken too strongly, 
stimulate his imagination to the pitch of visualizing 
the town in which he lives destroyed, his own 
house a smoking heap, his wife profaned, his 
children murdered, and himself ruined, for these 
are the things of which we know. Then, and then 
only, will he be able to judge the bravery of the 
nation which, preferring death to dishonour, has 
in all likelihood saved both France and ourselves 
from sharing its terrible but glorious fate. 



VII 

MALINES 

We were frequently requested by the Belgian 
doctors to assist them in the various Red Cross 
dressing-stations around Antwerp, and it was our 
custom to visit several of these stations each day 
to give what assistance we could. One of the 
most important of the stations was at Malines, 
and one of our cars called there every day. I 
went out there myself on an afternoon late in 
September. It was a glorious day, and after a 
heavy morning in the wards the fresh breeze and 
the brilliant sunshine were delightful. Our road 
led almost straight south through Vieux Dieu and 
Contich, crossing the little River Nethe at Wael- 
hem. The Nethe encircles Antwerp on the south 
and south-east, and it was here that the Belgians, 
and in the end the British, made their chief stand 
against the Germans. We crossed the bridge, and 
passed on to Malines under the guns of Fort 
Waelhem, with the great fortress of Wavre St. 
Catharine standing away to the left, impregnable 
to anything but the huge guns of to-day. 

61 



62 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Malines is a large town of 60,000 inhabitants, 
and is the cathedral city of the Archbishop of 
Belgium, the brave Cardinal Mercier. To-day it 
is important as a railway centre, and for its ex- 
tensive railway workshops, but the interest of the 
town lies in the past. It was of importance as 
early as the eighth century, and since then it has 
changed hands on an amazing number of occa- 
sions. Yet it is said that few of the cities of 
Europe contain so many fine old houses in such 
good preservation. The cathedral church of St. 
Rombold dates back to the thirteenth century, 
and in the fifteenth century was begun the huge 
tower which can be seen for many miles around. 
It was intended that it should be 550 feet high — 
the highest in the world — and though it has 
reached little more than half that height, it is a 
very conspicuous landmark. The Germans evi- 
dently found it a very tempting mark, for they 
began shelling it at an early stage. When we were 
there the tower had not been damaged, but a large 
hole in the roof of the church showed where a shell 
had entered. Inside everything was in chaos. 
Every window was broken, and of the fine stained 
glass hardly a fragment was left. A large portion 
of the roof was destroyed, and the floor was a con- 
fusion of chairs and debris. The wonderful carved 
wooden pulpit, with its almost life-size figures, was 



MALINES 63 

damaged. When the shell entered, the preacher's 
notes from the previous Sunday lay on the desk, 
and they were perforated by a fragment. 

The Croix Rouge was established in a large 
school on the south side of the town. We drove 
into the large courtyard, and went in to see if 
there was anything for us to do. The doctor in 
charge, a distinguished oculist, was an old friend 
and was very cordial, but he said there was no 
fighting near, and that no cases had come in. We 
stood talking for a few minutes, and were just 
going, when one of our other cars came in with 
a man very badly wounded. He was a cyclist 
scout, and had been shot while crossing a field a 
few miles away. He had been picked up at con- 
siderable risk by our people — for the Germans 
rarely respected a Red Cross — and brought in on 
the ambulance. He was wounded in the abdomen, 
and his right arm was shattered. He was in a 
desperate state, but the doctor begged me to do 
what I could for him, and, indeed, the power of 
recovery of these fellows was so remarkable that 
it was always worth a trial. As rapidly as pos- 
sible we got ready stimulants and hot saline solu- 
tion to inject into his veins. We had not come 
prepared for actual operating, and the local equip- 
ment was meagre, but we succeeded in improvising 
a transfusion apparatus out of various odds and 



64 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

ends. It did not take long to get it to work, and 
in a few minutes he began to respond to the hot 
salt and water running into his vessels. Alas ! it 
was only for a moment. He was bleeding in- 
ternally, and nothing could be done. I went over 
to the priest, who had just come, and said: " C'est 
a vous, monsieur." He bowed, and came forward 
holding in his hands the holy oil. A few mur- 
mured words were spoken, the priest's finger 
traced the sign of the Cross, a few moments of 
silence, and all was over. Death is always im- 
pressive, but I shall never forget that scene. The 
large schoolroom, with its improvised equipment, 
ourselves, a crowd of nurses and doctors standing 
round, in the centre the sandalled priest bending 
downwards in his brown mantle, and the dying 
man, his lips moving -to frame the last words he 
would speak on earth. It was in silence that we 
stole out into the sunlight of the courtyard. 

We went on to Sempst, a small village at the 
extreme limit of the Belgian lines. A little stream 
ran under the road beside a farm, and a rough 
breastwork had been thrown across the road to 
defend the bridge. German soldiers could be seen 
a mile down the road moving behind the trees. 
It was only a small Belgian outpost, but it was a 
good enough position to hold, so long as the enemy 
did not bring up artillery. A machine gun was 



MALINES 65 

hidden beside the bridge, and would have made 
short work of anyone advancing up the road. 
My friends were talking to the men, whom we 
knew quite well and for a moment I was standing 
alone, when one of the soldiers came up and asked 
about the man whom we had just left, and who 
had come from near by. I told him what had 
happened, and for a moment he did not speak. 
At last he looked up at me with tears in his eyes, 
and said simply: " He was my brother, and this 
morning we were laughing together." I held his 
hand for a moment, and then he turned away and 
went back to his post. 

Our way home led past a villa where an en- 
counter had taken place three days before be- 
tween the Belgians and an advanced detachment 
of German troops, and we stopped to see the 
scene of the fighting. It was a large country- 
house standing back in its own grounds, and 
during the night a party of Germans had suc- 
ceeded in concealing themselves inside. In the 
morning, by a ruse, they induced a Belgian de- 
tachment to come up the drive towards the house, 
never suspecting that it was not empty. Sud- 
denly the Germans opened fire, and I believe that 
scarcely a single Belgian escaped. Next day, 
however, having surrounded the villa, the Belgians 
opened fire upon it with their 3-inch guns. The 



66 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Germans made a bolt for it, and the whole of 
them were killed. As we walked up the drive we 
saw on the left-hand side a little row of graves 
with fresh flowers laid on them. They were the 
graves of the Belgian soldiers who had been en- 
trapped. An officer was standing by them with 
bared head, and, seeing us, he came over and 
walked on with us to the house, which he was 
then occupying with his soldiers. It was a fine 
house, with polished parquet floors and wide stair- 
cases. The dining-room was ornamented with 
delicate frescoes in gilt frames. In the drawing- 
room stood a new grand pianoforte, and light gilt 
chairs and sofas, looking strangely out of place on 
the field of war. By the front-door, sticking in 
the wall, was a shell which had failed to burst. 
I wonder if it is still there, or if anyone has ven- 
tured to shift it. It was half inside and half out- 
side, and if it had exploded there would not have 
been much of the entrance of the house left. 
Upstairs the rooms were in glorious confusion. 
Apparently the Germans had opened all the 
drawers, and flung their contents on the floor, 
with the idea, I suppose, of taking anything they 
wanted. One room was plainly the nursery, for 
the floor was covered with children's toys of all 
descriptions, all broken. It may be very un- 
reasonable, but that room made me more angry 



MALINES 67 

than all the rest of the house. There is some- 
thing so utterly wanton in trampling on a child's 
toys. They may be of no value, but I have a 
small opinion of a man who does not treat them 
with respect. They are the symbols of an inno- 
cence that once was ours, the tokens of a contact 
with the unseen world for which we in our blind- 
ness grope longingly in vain. 



VIII 

LIE-RRE 

When, years hence, some historian looks back upon 
the present war, and from the confusion of its 
battles tries to frame before his mind a picture of 
the whole, one grim conclusion will be forced upon 
his mind. He will note, perhaps, vast alterations 
in the map of Europe; he will lament a loss of life 
such as only the hand of Heaven has dealt before; 
he will point to the folly of the wealth destroyed. 
But beneath all these he will hear one insistent 
note from which he cannot escape, the deep 
keynote of the whole, the note on which the 
war was based, the secret of its ghastly chords, 
and the foundation of its dark conclusion. And 
he will write that in the year 1914 one of the 
great nations of civilized Europe relapsed into 
barbarism. 

In the large sense a nation becomes civilized as 
its members recognize the advantages of sinking 
their personal desires and gain in the general good 
of the State. The fact that an individual can 

68 



LIERRE 69 

read and write and play the piano has nothing at 
all to do with the degree of his civilization, an 
elementary axiom of which some of our rulers 
seem strangely ignorant. To be of use to the 
State, and to train others to be of use to the State 
(and not only of use to themselves), should be, and 
indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man. 
Unless it be so, his civilization is a mere veneer, 
ready to wear off at the first rub, and he himself 
a parasite upon the civilized world. 

As time has gone on, the State has laid down 
certain rules by means of which the men who 
formed it could serve it better, and these are our 
laws which we obey not for our own good directly, 
but for the good of the State. From the point of 
view of the plain man in the street, it is all utterly 
illogical, for it would be logical to go and take 
from your neighbour whatever you wished, so 
long as you were strong enough to hold it. But, 
let us thank Heaven, no sane man is logical, and 
only a Professor would dare to make the claim. 
It is one of the prerogatives of his office, and 
should be treated with tolerance. 

And as our views of life are small and limited by 
our surroundings, when States grew large they 
took from the shoulders of the individual his re- 
sponsibilities in the great State which the world 
has now become; and the States of which the world 



70 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

was composed agreed together on certain rules 
which should control their relations to one another, 
not for the good of each, but for the good of the 
greater State of which they were members. They 
are not so accurately laid down as the laws of 
our separate States, but they are broad, general 
principles for the use of statesmen and not of 
legalists. They are the Charter of Civilization 
among the nations of the world, and the nation 
which disregards them does so at her peril, and 
has handed in the abnegation of her position as 
a civilized State. Like the laws of each State, 
they are utterly illogical — at least, to those who 
have made up their minds that they are strong 
enough to hold what they can take from their 
neighbours. 

I am often told, in half-defence of what they 
have done, that the Germans are conducting the 
war in a strictly logical manner. At first, I must 
admit, I was rather taken with the idea, and, 
indeed, one felt almost sorry for a noble nation 
sacrificing its feelings on the uncompromising 
altar of Logic. For the object of war is obviously 
to defeat your enemy, and it may be argued that 
anything which will accelerate that result is not 
only justifiable, but almost humane, for it will 
shorten the unavoidable horrors of war. I should 
like to mention a few of the features of logical 



LIERRE 71 

warfare, all of which have at one time or another 
been adopted by our opponents, and I shall then 
describe as far as I can an example which I myself 
saw. 

When an army wishes to pass through a country, 
the civil population is in the way. To get rid of 
them, the best plan, and the quickest, is to anni- 
hilate the first town of a suitable size to which the 
army comes. If the town is wiped out, and men, 
women, and children slaughtered indiscriminately, 
it will make such an impression in the rest of the 
country that the whole population will clear out 
and there will be no further trouble. The country 
will then be free for the passage of troops, and 
there will be no troublesome civil population to 
feed or govern. The conduct of the war will be 
greatly facilitated. Of course, it will be necessary 
at intervals to repeat the process, but this presents 
the further advantage that it advertises to other 
nations what they may expect if war enters their 
borders. This, one of the most elementary rules 
of logical warfare, has been strictly observed by 
Germany. The sack of Louvain and the slaughter 
of its inhabitants met with an immediate success. 
Wherever the German army arrived, they entered 
with few exceptions empty towns. Termonde, 
Malines, Antwerp, had everything swept and gar- 
nished for their reception. It would, of course, 



72 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

be absurdly illogical to confine one's attack to 
persons capable of defence. To kill a hundred 
women and children makes far more impression 
than to kill a thousand men, and it is far safer, 
unless, of course, it is preferred to use them as a 
screen to protect your own advancing troops from 
the enemy's fire. 

It is a mistake to burden your transport with 
the enemy's wounded, or, indeed — low be it spoken 
— with your own. The former should always be 
killed, and the latter so far as the degree of culture 
of your country will allow. It is one of the regret- 
table points, logically, of Germany's warfare that 
she appears to pay some attention to her wounded, 
but our information on this point is deficient, and 
it is possible that she limits it to those who may 
again be useful. 

To kill the Medical Staff of the enemy is obvi- 
ously most desirable. Without them a large 
number of the wounded would die. If, therefore, 
it is possible to kill both the doctors and the 
wounded together, it is a great advantage, and of 
all possible objectives for artillery a hospital is 
the most valuable. So complete was our confi- 
dence in the German observance of this rule that 
when we heard that they were likely to bombard 
Antwerp, we were strongly advised to remove our 
Red Cross from the sight of prying aeroplanes, and 



LIERRE 73 

we took the advice. Several other hospitals were 
hit, but we escaped. 

There are many other rules of logical warfare, 
such as ignoring treaties, engagements, and, in- 
deed, the truth in any form. But these are those 
with which I myself came in contact, and which 
therefore interested me the most. There is only 
one unfortunate objection to logical warfare, and 
that is that it is the duty of the whole civilized 
world, as it values its eternal salvation, to blot 
out from the face of the earth they have defiled the 
nation which practises it. 

I do not wish to be unfair to those with whom 
we are fighting, or to arouse against them an unjust 
resentment. I am merely attempting to express 
succinctly the doctrines which have been pro- 
claimed throughout Germany for years, of which 
this war is the logical outcome, and in the light of 
which alone its incidents can be understood. She 
is the home of logic, the temple where material 
progress is worshipped as a god. For her there 
is no meaning in those dim yearnings of the human 
mind, in which logic has no part, since their founda- 
tions are hidden in depths beneath our ken, but 
which alone separate us from the beasts that 
perish. And, above all things, I would not be 
thought to include in such a sweeping statement 
all those who call themselves German. There 



74 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

are many in Germany who are not of this 
Germany, and in the end it may be for them as 
much as for ourselves that we shall have fought 
this war. 

It is only when viewed in this setting that a 
scene such as that we saw at Lierre can be 
understood. By itself it would stand naked, 
meaningless, and merely horrible. Clothed in 
these thoughts, it is pregnant with meaning, 
and forms p real ep! f ome of the whole German 
conception of war; for horror is their dearest 
ally, and that scene has left on my mind a feeling 
of horror which I do not think that time will 
ever eradicate. 

Lierre is an old-world town on the River Nethe, 
nine miles south of Antwerp, prosperous, and 
thoroughly Flemish. Its 20,000 inhabitants 
weave silk and brew beer, as they did when 
London was a village. Without the physical ad- 
vantages of Antwerp, and without the turbulence 
of Ghent, Lierre has escaped their strange vicissi- 
tudes, and for hundreds of years has enjoyed the 
prosperity of a quiet and industrious town. Its 
church of St. Gommarius is renowned for its mag- 
nificent proportions, its superb window tracery, 
and its wonderful rood-loft — features in which it 
has eclipsed in glory even the great cathedrals of 
Belgium, and which place it alone as a unique 



LIERRE 75 

achievement of the art of the fifteenth century. 
It is in no sense a military town, and has no 
defences, though there is a fort of the same name 
at no great distance from it. 

Into this town, without warning of any kind, 
the Germans one morning dropped two of their 
largest shells. One fell near the church, but fortu- 
nately did no harm. One fell in the Hospital of 
St. Elizabeth. We heard in Antwerp that several 
people had been wounded, and in the afternoon 
two of us went out in one of our cars to see if we 
could be of any service. We found the town in 
the greatest excitement, and the streets crowded 
with families preparing to leave, for they rightly 
regarded these shells as the prelude of others. In 
the square was drawn up a large body of recruits 
just called up — rather late in the day, it seemed to 
us. We slowly made our way through the crowds, 
and, turning to the right along the Malines road, 
we drew up in front of the hospital on our right- 
hand side. The shell had fallen almost vertically 
on to a large wing, and as we walked across the 
garden we could see that all the windows had been 
broken, and that most of the roof had been blown 
off. The nuns met us, and took us down into the 
cellars to see the patients. It was an infirmary, 
and crowded together in those cellars lay a strange 
medley of people. There were bedridden old 



76 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

women huddled up on mattresses, almost dead 
with terror. Wounded soldiers lay propped up 
against the walls; and women and little children, 
wounded in the fighting around, lay on straw and 
sacking. Apparently it is not enough to wound 
women and children; it is even necessary to destroy 
the harbour of refuge into which they have crept. 
The nuns were doing for them everything that 
was possible, under conditions of indescribable 
difficulty. They may not be trained nurses, but 
in the records of this war the names of the nuns of 
Belgium ought to be written in gold. Utterly 
careless of their own lives, absolutely without fear, 
they have cared for the sick, the wounded, and 
the dying, and they have faced any hardship and 
any danger rather than abandon those who turned 
to them for help. 

The nuns led us upstairs to the wards where the 
shell had burst. The dead had been removed, 
but the scene that morning must have been hor- 
rible beyond description. In the upper ward six 
wounded soldiers had been killed, and in the lower 
two old women. As we stood in the upper ward, 
it was difficult to believe that so much damage 
could have been caused by a single shell. It had 
struck almost vertically on the tiled roof, and, 
exploding in the attic, had blown in the ceiling 
into the upper ward. I had not realized before 



LIERRE 77 

that the explosion of a large shell is not absolutely 
instantaneous, but, in consequence of the speed of 
the shell, is spread over a certain distance. Here 
the shell had continued to explode as it passed 
down through the building, blowing the floor of 
the upper ward down into the ward below. A 
great oak beam, a foot square, was cut clean in 
two, the walls of both wards were pitted and 
pierced by fragments, and the tiled floor of the 
lower ward was broken up. The beds lay as they 
were when the dead were taken from them, the 
mattresses riddled with fragments and soaked 
with blood. Obviously no living thing could have 
survived in that awful hail. When the shell came 
the soldiers were eating walnuts, and on the bed 
of one lay a walnut half opened and the little pen- 
knife he was using, and both were stained. We 
turned away sickened at the sight, and retraced 
the passage with the nuns. As we walked along, 
they pointed out to us marks we had not noticed 
before — red finger-marks and splashes of blood on 
the pale blue distemper of the wall. All down the 
passage and the staircase we could trace them, 
and even in the hall below. Four men had been 
standing in the doorway of the upper ward. Two 
were killed; the others, bleeding and blinded by 
the explosion, had groped their way along that 
wall and down the stair. I have seen many 



78 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

terrible sights, but for utter and concentrated 
horror I have never seen anything to equal those 
finger-marks, the very sign-manual of Death. 
When I think of them, I see, in the dim light of the 
early autumn morning, the four men talking; I 
hear the wild shriek of the shell and the deafening 
crash of its explosion; and then silence, and two 
bleeding men groping in darkness and terror for 
the air. 



IX 

A PAUSE 

The life of a hospital at the front is a curious 
mixture of excitement and dulness. One week 
cases will be pouring in, the operating theatre will 
be working day and night, and everyone will have 
to do their utmost to keep abreast of the rush; 
next week there will be nothing to do, and every- 
one will mope about the building, and wonder 
why they were ever so foolish as to embark on 
such a futile undertaking. For it is all emergency 
work, and there is none of the dull routine of the 
ordinary hospital waiting list, which we are always 
trying to clear off, but which is in reality the 
backbone of the hospital's work. 

When we first started in Antwerp, the rush of 
cases was so great as to be positively overwhelm- 
ing. For more than twenty-four hours the sur- 
geons in the theatre were doing double work, two 
tables being kept going at the same time. During 
that time a hundred and fifty wounded were ad- 
mitted, all of them serious cases, and the hospital 

was full to overflowing. For the next ten days 

79 



80 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

we were kept busy, but then our patients began 
to recover, and many of them had to go away to 
military convalescent hospitals. The wards began 
to look deserted, and yet no more patients arrived. 
We began to think that it was all a mistake that 
we had come, that there would be no more fight- 
ing round Antwerp, and that we were not wanted. 
Indeed, we canvassed the possibilities of work in 
other directions, and in the meantime we drew up 
elaborate arrangements to occupy our time. There 
were to be courses of lectures and demonstrations 
in the wards, and supplies of books and papers 
were to be obtained. Alas ! for the vanity of 
human schemes, the wounded began to pour in 
again, and not a lecture was given. 

During that slack week we took the opportunity 
to see a certain amount of Antwerp, and to call 
on many officials and the many friends who did 
so much to make our work there a success and 
our stay a pleasure. To one lady we can never 
be sufficiently grateful. She placed at our dis- 
posal her magnificent house, a perfect palace in 
the finest quarter of the city. Several of our 
nurses lived there, we had a standing invitation 
to dinner, and, what we valued still more, there 
were five bathrooms ready for our use at any hour 
of the day. Their drawing-room had been con- 
verted into a ward for wounded officers, and held 



A PAUSE 81 

about twenty beds. One of the daughters had 
trained as a nurse, and under her charge it was 
being run in thoroughly up-to-date style. The 
superb tapestries with which the walls were 
decorated had been covered with linen, and but 
for the gilded panelling it might have been a ward 
in a particularly finished hospital. I often wonder 
what has happened to that house. The family 
had to fly to England, and unless it was destroyed 
by the shells, it is occupied by the Germans. 

Calling in Antwerp on our professional brethren 
was very delightful for one's mind, but not a little 
trying for one's body. Their ideas of entertain- 
ment were so lavish, and it was so difficult to 
refuse their generosity, that it was a decided mis- 
take to attempt two calls in the same afternoon. 
To be greeted at one house with claret of a rare 
vintage, and at the next with sweet champagne, 
especially when it is plain that your host will be 
deeply pained if a drop is left, is rather trying to 
a tea-drinking Briton. They were very good to 
us, and we owed a great deal to their help. Most 
of all we owed to Dr. Morlet, for he had taken 
radiographs of all our fractures, and of many 
others of our cases. We went to see him one 
Sunday afternoon at his beautiful house in the 
Avenue Plantin. He also had partly converted 
his house into a hospital for the wounded, and we 

6 



82 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

saw twenty or thirty of them in a large drawing- 
room. The rest of the house was given up to 
the most magnificent electro-therapeutical equip- 
ment I have ever seen or heard of. We wandered 
through room after room filled with superb ap- 
paratus for X-ray examinations, X-ray treatment, 
diathermy, and electrical treatment of every known 
kind. It was not merely that apparatus for all 
these methods was there. Whole rooms full of 
apparatus were given up to each subject. It was 
the home of a genius and an enthusiast, who 
thought no sum too great if it were to advance 
his science. Little did we think that ten days 
later we should pick its owner up upon the road 
from Antwerp, a homeless wanderer, struggling 
along with his wife and his family, leaving behind 
everything he possessed in the world, in the hope 
that he might save them from the Germans. We 
heard from him not long ago that they had carried 
off to Germany all the wonderful machinery on 
which he had spent his life. 

The very next morning, while we were still at 
breakfast, the wounded began to arrive, and we 
never had another day in Antwerp that was not 
crowded with incident. The wounded almost 
always came in large batches, and the reason of 
this was the method of distribution adopted by 
the authorities. All the injured out at the front 



A PAUSE 83 

were collected as far as possible to one centre, 
where a train was waiting to receive them. There 
they remained until the train was sufficiently 
filled, when it brought them into the Centra] 
Station of Antwerp. At this point was estab- 
lished the distributing station, with a staff of 
medical officers, who arranged the destination of 
each man. Antwerp has a very complete system 
of electric trams, scarcely a street being without 
one, and of these full use was made for the trans- 
port of the wounded. Those who could sit went 
in ordinary cars, but for the stretcher cases 
there were cars specially fitted to take ordinary 
stretchers. A car was filled up with cases for one 
hospital, and in most cases it could deposit them 
at the door. It was an admirable method of 
dealing with them, simple and expeditious, and it 
involved far less pain and injury to the men than 
a long journey on an ambulance. In fact, we were 
only allowed in exceptional circumstances to bring 
in wounded on our cars, and it is obvious that it 
was a wise plan, for endless confusion would have 
been the result if anyone could have picked up the 
wounded and carried them off where they liked« 
Our cars were limited for the most part to carry- 
ing the injured to the various dressing-stations 
and to the train, and for these purposes they were 
always welcomed. They were soon well known 



84 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

at the trenches, and wherever the fighting was 
heaviest you might be sure to find one of them. 
Many were the hairbreadth escapes of which they 
had to tell, for if there were wounded they brought 
them out of danger, shells or no shells. And it 
says as much for the coolness of the drivers as 
for their good luck that no one was ever injured; 
for danger is halved by cool judgment, and a bold 
driver will come safely through where timidity 
would fail. 



THE SIEGE 

It is difficult to say exactly when the Siege of 
Antwerp began. For weeks we heard the distant 
boom of the guns steadily drawing nearer day 
by day, and all night the sky was lit up by distant 
flashes. But so peculiar was the position of 
Antwerp that it was not till the last ten days 
that our life was seriously affected, and not till 
the very end that communication with our 
friends and the getting of supplies became difficult. 
Our first real domestic tragedy was the destruction 
of the waterworks on the 30th of September. They 
lay just behind Waelhem, some six miles south 
of Antwerp, and into them the Germans poured 
from the other side of Malines a stream of 28-centi- 
metre shells, with the result that the great reser- 
voir burst. Until one has had to do without a 
water-supply in a large city it is impossible to 
realize to what a degree we are dependent upon 
it. In Antwerp, fortunately, a water-supply has 
been regarded as somewhat of an innovation, and 
almost every house, in the better class quarters 

85 



86 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

at least, has its own wells and pumps. It was, 
however, the end of the summer, and the wells 
were low; our own pumps would give us barely 
enough water for drinking purposes. The author- 
ities did all they could, and pumped up water 
from the Scheldt for a few hours each day, 
enabling us, with considerable difficulty, to keep 
the drainage system clear. But this water was 
tidal and brackish, whilst as to the number of 
bacteria it contained it was better not to inquire. 
We boiled and drank it when we could get nothing 
else, but of all the nauseous draughts I have ever 
consumed, not excluding certain hospital mix- 
tures of high repute, tea made with really salt 
water is the worst. Coffee was a little better, 
though not much, and upon that we chiefly relied. 
But I really think that that was one of the most 
unpleasant of our experiences. A more serious 
matter from the point of view of our work was 
the absence of water in the operating theatre. 
We stored it as well as we could in jugs, but in a 
rush that was inadequate, and we began to realize 
what the difficulties were with which surgeons 
had to contend in South Africa. We were really 
driven out of Antwerp at a very fortunate moment, 
and I have often wondered what we should have 
done if we had stopped there for another week. 
Such a very large proportion of the inhabitants 



THE SIEGE 87 

of Antwerp had already disappeared that there 
was never any great shortage of supplies. Milk 
and butter were the first things to go, and fresh 
vegetables followed soon after. It was always a 
mystery to me that with the country in such a 
condition they went on for as long as they did. 
The peasants must have worked their farms until 
they were absolutely driven out, and indeed in 
our expeditions into the country we often saw 
fields being ploughed and cattle being fed when 
shells were falling only a few fields away. How- 
ever, margarine and condensed milk are not bad 
substitutes for the real articles, and the supply of 
bread held out to the very end. A greater diffi- 
culty was with our kitchen staff of Belgian women, 
for a good many of them took fright and left us, 
and it was not at all easy to get their places filled. 
As the week went on the pressure of the enemy 
became steadily greater. On Tuesday, the 29th of 
September, the great fortress of Wavre St. Cath- 
erine fell, blown up, r6 is believed, by the accidental 
explosion of a shell inside the galleries. It had 
been seriously battered by the big German howit- 
zers, and it could not in any case have held out 
for another day. But the results of the explosion 
were terrible. Many of the wounded came to us, 
and they were the worst cases we had so far seen. 
On Thursday Fort Waelhem succumbed after a 



88 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

magnificent resistance. The garrison held it until 
it was a mere heap of ruins, and, indeed, they had 
the greatest difficulty in making their way out. 
I think that there is very little doubt that the 
Germans were using against these forts their 
largest guns, the great 42-centimetre howitzers. 
It is known that two of these were brought north- 
wards past Brussels after the fall of Maubeuge, 
and a fragment which was given to us was almost 
conclusive. It was brought to us one morning 
as an offering by a grateful patient, and it came 
from the neighbourhood of Fort Waelhem. It 
was a mass of polished steel two feet long, a foot 
wide, and three inches thick, and it weighed about 
fifty pounds. It was very irregular in shape, with 
edges sharp as razors, without a particle of rust 
upon it. It had been picked up where it fell 
still hot, and it was by far the finest fragment of 
shell I have ever seen. Alas ! we had to leave it 
behind, and it lies buried in a back-garden beside 
our hospital. Some day it will be dug up, and 
will be exhibited as conclusive evidence that the 
Germans did use their big guns in shelling the 
town. The destruction produced by such a shell 
is almost past belief. I have seen a large house 
struck by a single shell of a much smaller size 
than this, and it simply crumpled up like a pack 
of cards. As a house it disappeared, and all that 



THE SIEGE 89 

was left was a heap of bricks and mortar. When 
one considers that these guns have a range of some 
ten miles, givingMont Blanc considerable clearance 
on the way, and that one of them out at Harrow 
could drop shells neatly into Charing Cross, some 
idea of their power can be obtained. 

Every day we had visits from the enemy's 
aeroplanes, dropping bombs or literature, or 
merely giving the range of hospitals and other 
suitable obj ectives to the German gunners. From 
the roof of the hospital one could get a magnificent 
view of their evolutions, and a few kindred spirits 
always made a rush for a door on to the roof, the 
secret of which was carefully preserved, as the 
accommodation was limited. It was a very pretty 
sight to watch the Taube soaring overhead, fol- 
lowed by the puffs of smoke from the explosion of 
shells fired from the forts. The puffs would come 
nearer and nearer as the gunners found the range, 
until one felt that the next must bring the Taube 
down. Then suddenly the airman would turn 
his machine off in another direction, and the shells 
would fall wider than ever. One's feelings were 
torn between admiration for the airman's daring 
and an unholy desire to see him fall. 

It was evident that Antwerp could not with- 
stand much longer the pressure of the enemy's 
guns, and we were not surprised when on Friday 



90 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

we received an official notice from the British 
Consul - General, Sir Cecil Herstlet, that the 
Government were about to leave for Ostend, and 
advising all British subjects to leave by a boat 
which had been provided for them on Saturday. 
On Saturday morning came an order from the 
Belgian Army Medical Service instructing us to 
place on tramcars all our wounded, and to send 
them to the railway station. It appeared evident 
that Antwerp was to be evacuated, and we took 
the order to clear out our wounded as an intima- 
tion that our services would be no longer required. 
We got all our men ready for transport, and pro- 
ceeded to pack up the hospital. The tramcars 
arrived, and we bade good-bye to our patients, 
and saw them off, some in ordinary trams and 
some in specially equipped stretcher-cars. It was 
a dismal scene. 

The hall of the hospital was still covered with 
stretchers on which lay patients waiting their 
turn for the cars to take them, and the whole 
hospital was in process of being dismantled, when 
tramcars began to arrive back from the station 
with the patients we had just packed off. They 
told us that the whole of Antwerp was covered 
with tramloads of wounded soldiers, that there 
were five thousand in the square in front of the 
railway station, and that two trains had been 



THE SIEGE 91 

provided to take them away ! It was evident 
that some extraordinary blunder had been made; 
and while we were in doubt as to what to do, a 
second order came to us cancelling entirely the 
evacuation order which we and all the other 
hospitals in Antwerp had received a few hours 
before. It was all so perplexing that we felt that 
the only satisfactory plan was to go round to the 
British Consul and find out what it all meant. 
We came back with the great news that British 
Marines were coming to hold Antwerp. That was 
good enough for us. In less than an hour the 
hospital was in working order again, and the 
patients were back in their beds, and a more 
jubilant set of patients I have never seen. It was 
the most joyful day in the history of the hospital, 
and if we had had a case of champagne, it should 
have been opened. As it was, we had to be con- 
tent with salt coffee. 

But there was one dreadful tragedy. Some of 
our patients had not returned. In the confusion 
at the station one tramcar loaded with our patients 
had been sent off to another hospital by mistake. 
And the worst of it was that some of these were 
our favourite patients. There was nothing for it 
but to start next morning and make a tour of the 
hospitals in search of them. We were not long 
in finding them, for most of them were in a large 



92 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

hospital close by. I do not think we shall ever 
forget the reception we got when we found them. 
They had left us on stretchers, but they tried to 
get out of bed to come away with us, and one of 
them was a septic f actured thigh with a hole in his 
leg into which you could put your fist, and another 
had recently had a serious abdominal operation. 
They seized our hands and would scarcely let us 
go until we had promised that as soon as we had 
arranged with the authorities they should come 
back to our hospital. It was managed after a 
little diplomacy, and they all came back next day, 
and we were again a united family. 



XI 

CONTICH 

Sunday, the 4th of October, dawned with an 
extraordinary feeling of relief and expectancy in 
the air. The invincible British had arrived, huge 
guns were on their way, a vast body of French 
and British troops was advancing by forced 
marches, and would attack our besiegers in the 
rear, and beyond all possibility of doubt crush 
them utterly. But perhaps the most convincing 
proof of all was the round head of the First Lord 
of the Admiralty calmly having his lunch in the 
Hotel St. Antoine. Surely nothing can inspire 
such confidence as the sight of an Englishman 
eating. It is one of the most substantial phe- 
nomena in nature, and certainly on this occasion 
I found the sight more convincing than a political 
speech. Obviously we were saved, and one felt a 
momentary pang of pity for the misguided Ger- 
mans who had taken on such an impossible task. 
The sight of British troops in the streets and of 
three armoured cars carrying machine guns settled 
the question, and we went home to spread the 

93 



94 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

good news and to follow the noble example of the 
First Lord. 

In the afternoon three of us went off in one 
of the motors for a short run, partly to see if we 
could be of any use at the front with the wounded, 
and partly to see, if possible, the British troops. 
We took a stretcher with us, in case there should 
be any wounded to bring in from outlying posts. 
Everywhere we found signs of the confidence 
which the British had brought. It was visible in 
the face of every Belgian soldier, and even the 
children cheered our khaki uniforms as we passed. 
Everywhere there were signs of a new activity 
and of a new hope. The trenches and wire en- 
tanglements around the town, already very ex- 
tensive, were being perfected, and to our eyes 
they looked impregnable. We did not then 
realize how useless it is to attempt to defend a 
town, and, unfortunately, our ignorance was not 
limited to civilians. It is a curious freak of 
modern war that a ploughed field should be 
stronger than any citadel. But, as I say, these 
things were hidden from us, and our allies gave 
the finishing touches to their trenches, to the high 
entertainment of the Angels, as Stevenson would 
have told us. If only those miles of trench 
and acres of barbed wire had been placed 
ten miles away, and backed by British guns, 



CONTICH 95 

the story of Antwerp might have been a very 
different one. 

The road to Boom is like all the main roads of 
Belgium. The central causeway was becoming 
worn by the constant passage of heavy motor 
lorries tearing backwards and forwards at racing- 
speed. The sides were deep in dust, for there had 
been little rain. On each side rose poplars in 
ordered succession, and the long, straight stretches 
of the road were framed in the endless vista of 
their tall trunks. And in that frame moved a 
picture too utterly piteous for any words to 
describe — a whole country fleeing before the Huns. 
The huge unwieldy carts of the Belgian farmer 
crept slowly along, drawn by great Flemish horses. 
In front walked the men, plodding along beside 
the splendid animals, with whose help they had 
ploughed their fields — fields they would never see 
again. In the carts was piled up all that thejr 
possessed in the world, all that they could carry 
of their homes wrecked and blasted by the Van- 
dals, a tawdry ornament or a child's toy looking 
out pitifully from the heap of clothes and bedding. 
And seated on the top of the heap were the woman 
and the children. 

But these were the well-to-do. There were 
other little groups who had no cart and no horse. 
The father and a son would walk in front carrying 



96 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

all that a man could lift on their strong backs; 
then came the children, boys and girls, each with 
a little white bundle over their shoulder done up 
in a towel or a pillowslip, tiny mites of four or 
five doing all they could to save the home; and 
last came the mother with a baby at her breast, 
trudging wearily through the dust. They came 
in an endless stream, over and over again, for 
mile after mile, always in the same pathetic little 
groups, going away, only going away. 

At last, with a sigh of relief, we reached Boom, 
and the end of the lines of refugees, for the Ger- 
mans themselves were not far beyond. At the 
Croix Rouge we asked for instructions as to where 
we were likely to be useful. Boom had been 
shelled in the morning, but it was now quiet, and 
there was no fighting in the neighbourhood. We 
could hear the roar of guns in the distance on the 
east, and we were told that severe fighting was 
in progress in that direction. The British had 
reinforced the Belgian troops in the trenches at 
Duffel, and the Germans were attacking the posi- 
tion in force. Taking the road to the left, we 
passed the great brickfields which provide one 
of the chief industries of Boom, and we drove 
through the poorer portion of the town which lies 
amongst them. It was utterly deserted. It was 
in this part of the town that the shelling had been 



CONTICH 97 

most severe, but a large number of the shells must 
have fallen harmlessly in the brickfields, as only 
a house here and there was damaged. If, how- 
ever, the object of the Germans was to clear the 
town of inhabitants, they had certainly succeeded, 
for there was not a man, woman, or child to be 
seen anywhere. It is a strange and uncanny 
thing to drive through a deserted town. Only a 
few days before we had driven the same way, and 
we had to go quite slowly to avoid the crowd in 
the streets. This time we crept along slowly, but 
for a very different reason. We distrusted those 
empty houses. We never knew what might be 
hiding round the next corner, but we did know 
that a false turning would take us straight into 
the German lines. It was the only way by which 
we could reach our destination, but we were 
beyond the main Belgian lines, and our road was 
only held by a few isolated outposts. After a mile 
or so we came upon a small outpost, and they told 
us that we should be safe as far as Rumps, about 
three miles farther, where their main outpost was 
placed. An occasional shell sailed over our heads 
to reassure us, some from our own batteries, and 
some from the enemy's. We only hoped that 
neither side would fire short. 

At Rumps we found the headquarters of the 

regiment, and several hundred troops. At the 

7 



98 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

sight of our khaki uniforms they at once raised a 
cheer, and we had quite an ovation as we passed 
down the street. At the Etat Majeur the Colonel 
himself came out to see us, and his officers crowded 
round as he asked us anxiously about the British 
arrivals. He pulled out his orders for the day, 
and told us the general disposition of the British 
and Belgian troops. He told us that the road to 
Duffel was too dangerous, and that we must turn 
northwards to Contich, but that there might be 
some wounded in the Croix Rouge station there. 
He and his men were typical of the Belgian Army 
— brave, simple men, defending their country as 
best they could, without fuss or show. I hope 
they have come to no harm. If only that army 
had been trained and equipped like ours, the 
Germans would have had a hard struggle to get 
through Belgium. 

We turned away from the German lines north- 
wards towards Contich. Our road lay across the 
open country, between the farms which mean so 
much of Belgium's wealth. In one field a man 
was ploughing with three big horses. He was too 
old to fight, but he could do this much for his 
country. Surely that man deserves a place in his 
country's Roll of Honour. Shells were falling not 
four fields away, but he never even looked up. 
It must take more nerve to plough a straight 



CONTICH 99 

furrow when the shells are falling than to aim a 
gun. I like to think of that man, and I hope that 
he will be left to reap his harvest in peace. A 
little farther on we came upon the objective of the 
German shells — a battery so skilfully concealed 
that it was only when we were close to it that we 
realized where it was. The ammunition-carts were 
drawn up in a long line behind a hedge, while the 
guns themselves were buried in piles of brushwood. 
They must have been invisible from the captive 
balloon which hung over the German lines in the 
distance. They were not firing when we passed, 
and we were not sorry, as we had no desire to be 
there when the replies came. An occasional shell 
gives a certain spice to the situation, but in 
quantity they are better avoided. 

As we approached Contich a soldier came 
running up and told us that two people had just 
been injured by a shell, and begged us to come to 
see them. He stood on the step of the car, and 
directed us to a little row of cottages half a mile 
farther on. At the roadside was a large hole in 
the ground where a shell had fallen some minutes 
before, and beside it an unfortunate cow with its 
hind-quarters shattered. In the garden of the 
first cottage a poor woman lay on her back. She 
was dead, and her worn hands were already cold. 
As I rose from my knees a young soldier flung 



100 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

himself down beside her, sobbing as though his 
heart would break. She was his mother. 

Behind the cottage we found a soldier with his 
left leg torn to fragments. He had lost a great 
deal of blood, and he was still bleeding from a 
large artery, in spite of the efforts of a number of 
soldiers round who were applying tourniquets 
without much success. The ordinary tourniquet 
is probably the most inefficient instrument that 
the mind of man could devise — at least, for deal- 
ing with wounds of the thigh out in the field. It 
might stop haemorrhage in an infant, but for a 
burly soldier it is absurd. I tried two of the most 
approved patterns, and both broke in my hands. 
In the end I managed to stop it with a handker- 
chief and a stick. I would suggest the elimina- 
tion of all tourniquets, and the substitution of the 
humble pocket-handkerchief. It, at least, does 
not pretend to be what it is not. Between shock 
and loss of blood our soldier was pretty bad, and 
we did not lose much time in transferring him to 
our car on a stretcher. The Croix Rouge dressing- 
station was more than a mile farther on, estab- 
lished in a large villa in its own grounds. We 
carried our man in, and laid him on a table with 
the object of dressing his leg properly, and of 
getting the man himself into such condition as 
would enable him to stand the journey back to 



CONTTCH 101 

Antwerp. Alas ! the dressing-station was desti- 
tute of any of the most elementary appliances for 
the treatment of a seriously wounded man. There 
was not even a fire, and the room was icy cold. 
There was no hot water, no brandy, no morphia, 
no splints, and only a minute quantity of dressing 
material. A cupboard with some prehistoric in- 
struments in it was the only evidence of surgery 
that we could find. The Belgian doctor in charge 
was doing the best he could, but what he could be 
expected to do in such surroundings I do not 
know. He seemed greatly relieved to hear that 
I was a surgeon, and he was most kind in trying 
to find me everything for which I asked. From 
somewhere we managed to raise some brandy and 
hot water, and a couple of blankets, and with the 
dressings we had brought with us we made the 
best of a bad job, and started for home with our 
patient. Antwerp was eight miles away. It was 
a bitterly cold evening, and darkness was coming 
on. It seemed improbable that we could get our 
patient home alive, but it was perfectly certain 
that he would die if we left him where he was. 
It seemed such a pity that a little more fore- 
thought and common sense could not have been 
expended on that dressing-station, and yet we 
found that with rare exceptions this was the 
regular state of affairs, whether in Belgium or 



102 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

France. It seems to be impossible for our pro- 
fessional brethren on the Continent to imagine any 
treatment apart from a completely equipped hos- 
pital. Their one idea seems to be to get the 
wounded back to a base hospital, and if they die 
on the way it cannot be helped. The dressing- 
stations are mere offices for their redirection, where 
they are carefully ticketed, but where little else 
is done. Of course, it is true that the combatant 
forces are the first consideration, and that from 
their point of view the wounded are simply in the 
way, and the sooner they are carried beyond the 
region of the fighting the better; but if this argu- 
ment were carried to its logical conclusion, there 
should be no medical services at the front at all, 
except what might be absolutely necessary for the 
actual transport of the wounded. I am glad to 
say that our later experiences showed that the 
British influence was beginning to make itself felt, 
and that the idea of the wounded as a mere useless 
encumbrance was being modified by more humani- 
tarian considerations. And in a long war it must 
be obvious to the most hardened militarist that 
by the early treatment of a wound many of its 
more severe consequences may be averted, and 
that many a man may thus be saved for further 
service. In a war of exhaustion, the ultimate 



CONTICH 103 

result might well depend on how the wounded 
were treated in the field. 

The road was crowded with traffic, and it was 
quite dark before we reached Antwerp. Our 
patient did not seem much the worse for his 
journey, though that is perhaps faint praise. We 
soon had him in our theatre, which was always 
warm and ready for cases such as this. With 
energetic treatment his condition rapidly im- 
proved, and when we left him to go to dinner we 
felt that our afternoon had not been entirely 
wasted. 



XII 

THE BOMBARDMENT— NIGHT 

We had had plenty of notice that we might expect 
a bombardment. On Saturday a boat had left with 
most of the English Colony. On Tuesday morning 
the Germans sent in official notice that they in- 
tended to bombard the city, and in the evening 
the Government and the Legations left by boat 
with the remainder of our countrymen who lived 
in Antwerp. We had faced the prospect and 
made every preparation for it, and yet when it did 
come it came upon us as a surprise. It is some- 
times fortunate that our capacities for anticipation 
are so limited. 

It was almost midnight on Wednesday, the 7th 
of October, and two of us were sitting in the office 
writing despatches home. The whole building 
was in absolute silence, and lit only by the subdued 
light of an occasional candle. In the distance we 
could hear the dull booming of the guns. Sud- 
denly above our heads sounded a soft whistle, 
which was not the wind, followed by a dull thud 
in the distance. We looked at one another. 

104 



THE BOMBARDMENT— NIGHT 105 

Again it came, this time a little louder. We ran 
up to the roof and stood there for some moments, 
fascinated by the scene. From the dull grey sky 
came just sufficient light to show the city laying 
in darkness around us, its tall spires outlined as 
dim shadows against the clouds. Not a sound 
arose from streets and houses around, but every 
few seconds there came from the south-east a 
distant boom, followed by the whistle of a shell 
overhead and the dull thud of its explosion. The 
whole scene was eerie and uncanny in the extreme. 
The whistle changed to a shriek and the dull thud 
to a crash close at hand, followed by the clatter of 
falling bricks cutting sharply into the stillness of 
the night. Plainly this was going to be a serious 
business, and Ave must take instant measures for 
the safety of our patients. At any moment a 
shell might enter one of the wards, and — well, we 
had seen the hospital at Lierre. We ran down- 
stairs and told the night nurses to get the patients 
ready for removal, whilst we went across to the 
gymnasium to arouse those of the staff who slept 
there. We collected all our stretchers, and began the 
methodical removal of all our patients to the base- 
ment. In a few minutes there was a clang at the 
front-door bell, and our nurses and assistants who 
lived outside began to arrive. Two of the dressers 
had to come half a mile along the Malines road, 



106 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

where the shells were falling thickest, and every 
few yards they had had to shelter in doorways 
from the flying shrapnel. The bombardment had 
begun in earnest now, and shells were fairly pouring 
over our heads. We started with the top floor, 
helping down those patients who could walk, and 
carrying the rest on stretchers. When that was 
cleared we took the second, and I think we all 
breathed a sigh of relief when we heard that the 
top floor was empty. We were fortunate in having 
a basement large enough to accommodate all our 
patients, and wide staircases down which the 
stretchers could be carried without difficulty; but 
the patients were all full-grown men, and as most 
of them had to be carried it was hard work. 

I shall never forget the scene on the great stair- 
case, crowded with a long train of nurses, doctors, 
and dressers carrying the wounded down as gently 
and as carefully as if they were in a London hos- 
pital. I saw no sign of fear in any face, only 
smiles and laughter. And yet overhead was a 
large glass roof, and there was no one there who 
did not realize that a shell might come through 
that roof at any moment, and that it would not 
leave a single living person beneath it. It made 
one proud to have English blood running in one's 
veins. We had 113 wounded, and within an 
hour they were all in places of safety; mattresses 



THE BOMBARDMENT—NIGHT 107 

and blankets were brought, and they were all 
made as comfortable as possible for the night. 
Four were grave intestinal cases. Seven had 
terrible fractures of the thigh, but fortunately five 
of these had been already repaired with steel plates, 
and their transport was easy; in fact, I met one 
of them on the staircase, walking with the support 
of a dresser's arm, a week after the operation ! 
Some of the patients must have suffered excru- 
ciating pain in being moved, but one never heard a 
murmur, and if a groan could not be kept back, 
it was passed over with a jest for fear we should 
notice it. It was a magnificent basement, with 
heavy arched roofs everywhere, and practically 
shell-proof. The long passages and the large 
kitchens were all tiled and painted white, and as 
the electric light was still running and the whole 
building was well warmed, it would have been 
difficult to find a more cheerful and comfortable 
place. Coffee was provided for everyone, and 
when I took a last look round the night nurses 
were taking charge as if nothing had happened, 
and the whole place was in the regular routine of 
an ordinary everyday hospital. 

Upstairs there was an improvised meal in pro- 
gress in the office, and after our two hours' hard 
work we were glad of it. It is really wonderful 
how cheerful a thing a meal is in the middle of the 



108 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

night, with plenty of hot coffee and a borrowed 
cake. It is one of the compensations of our life 
in hospital, and even shells are powerless to disturb 
it. After that, as we knew we should have a 
heavy day before us, we all settled down in the 
safest corners we could find to get what rest we 
could. The staircase leading up to the entrance 
hall was probably the safest spot in the building, 
covered as it was by a heavy arch, and it was soon 
packed with people in attitudes more or less restful. 
A ward with a comfortable bed seemed to me quite 
safe enough, and I spent the night with three 
equally hedonistic companions. At first we lay 
listening to the shells as they passed overhead, 
sometimes with the soft whistle of distance, and 
sometimes with the angry shriek of a shell passing 
near. Occasionally the shriek would drop to a 
low howl, the note of a steam siren as it stops, 
and then a deafening crash and the clatter of 
falling bricks and glass would warn us that we 
had only escaped by a few yards. But even 
listening to shells becomes monotonous, and my 
eyes gradually glued together, and I fell asleep. 

When I awoke it was early morning, and day- 
light had just come. The shells were still arriving, 
but not so fast, and mostly at a much greater 
distance. But another sound came at intervals, 
and we had much discussion as to what it might 



THE BOMBARDMENT— NIGHT 109 

mean. Every three and a half minutes exactly 
there came two distant booms, but louder than 
usual, and then two terrific shrieks one after the 
other, exactly like the tearing of a giant sheet of 
calico, reminding us strongly of the famous scene 
in " Peter Pan." Away they went in the distance, 
and if we ever heard the explosion it was a long 
way off. They certainly sounded like shells fired 
over our heads from quite close, and at a very low 
elevation, and we soon evolved the comforting 
theory that they were from a pair of big British 
guns planted up the river, and firing over the town 
at the German trenches beyond. We even saw 
a British gunboat lying in the Scheldt, and un- 
limited reinforcements pouring up the river. 
Alas ! it was only a couple of big German guns 
shelling the harbour and the arsenal; at least, 
that is the conclusion at which we have since 
arrived. But for some hours those shells were a 
source of great satisfaction and comfort. One 
can lie in bed with great contentment, I find, when 
it is the other people who are being shelled. 



XIII 

THE BOMBARDMENT— DAY 

We were up early in the morning, and our first 
business was to go round to the British Head- 
quarters to find out what they intended to do, and 
what they expected of us as a British base hos- 
pital. If they intended to stay, and wished us to 
do likewise, we were quite prepared to do so, but 
we did not feel equal to the responsibility of 
keeping more than a hundred wounded in a posi- 
tion so obviously perilous. From shrapnel they 
were fairly safe in the basement, but from large 
shells or from incendiary bombs there is no pro- 
tection. It is not much use being in a cellar if the 
house is burnt down over your head. So two of 
us started off in our motor to get news. 

The Headquarters were in the Hotel St. Antoine, 
at the corner of the Place Verte opposite to the 
Cathedral, so we had to go right across the town. 
We went by the Rue d'Argile and the Rue Leo- 
pold, and we had a fair opportunity of estimating 
the results of the night's bombardment. In the 
streets through which we passed it was really 

110 



THE BOMBARDMENT— DAY 111 

astonishingly small. Cornices had been knocked 
off, and the fragments lay in the streets; a good 
many windows were broken, and in a few cases 
a shell had entered an attic and blown up the roof. 
Plainly only small shells had been used. We did 
not realize that many of the houses we passed 
were just beginning to get comfortably alight, and 
that there was no one to put out the fires that 
had only begun so far to smoulder. A few 
people were about, evidently on their way out of 
Antwerp, but the vast bulk of the population had 
already gone. It is said that the population of 
half a million numbered by the evening only a few 
hundreds. We passed a small fox terrier lying on 
the pavement dead, and somehow it has remained 
in my mind as a most pathetic sight. He had 
evidently been killed by a piece of shrapnel, and it 
seemed very unfair. But probably his people had 
left him, and he was better out of it. 

We turned into the Marche aux Souliers, and 
drew up at the Hotel St. Antoine, and as we 
stepped down from the car a shell passed close to 
us with a shriek, and exploded with a terrific crash 
in the house opposite across the narrow street. We 
dived into the door of the hotel to escape the 
falling debris. So far the shells had been whistling 
comfortably over our heads, but it was evident 
that the Germans were aiming at the British Head- 



112 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

quarters, and that we had put our heads into the 
thick of it, for it was now positively raining shells 
all round us. But we scarcely noticed them in 
our consternation at what we found, for the British 
Staff had disappeared. We wandered through 
the deserted rooms which had been so crowded a 
few days before, but there was not a soul to be 
seen. They had gone, and left no address. At 
last an elderly man appeared, whom I took to be 
the proprietor, and all he could tell us was that 
there was no one but himself in the building. Of 
all the desolate spots in the world I think that an 
empty hotel is the most desolate, and when you 
have very fair reason to believe that a consider- 
able number of guns are having a competition as 
to which can drop a shell into it first, it becomes 
positively depressing. We got into our car and 
drove down the Place de Meir to the Belgian Croix 
Rouge, where we hoped to get news of our country- 
men, and there we were told that they had gone 
to the Belgian Etat Majeur near by. We had a 
few minutes' conversation with the President of 
the Croix Rouge, a very good friend of ours, tall 
and of striking appearance, with a heavy grey 
moustache. We asked him what the Croix Rouge 
would do. " Ah," he said, " we will stay to the 
last !" At that very moment a shell exploded 
with a deafening crash just outside in the Place de 



THE BOMBARDMENT— BAY 113 

Meir. I looked at the President, and he threw up 
his hands in despair and led the way out of the 
building. The Belgian Red Cross had finished its 
work. 

At last at the Etat Majeur we found our Head- 
quarters, and I sincerely hope that wherever 
General Paris, Colonel Bridges, and Colonel Seely 
go, they will always find people as pleased to see 
them as we were. They very kindly told us some- 
thing of the situation, and said that, though they 
had every intention of holding Antwerp, they 
advised us to clear out, and they placed at our 
disposal four motor omnibuses for the transport 
of the wounded. So off we drove back to the 
hospital to make arrangements for evacuating. 
It was a lively drive, for I suppose that the 
Germans had had breakfast and had got to work 
again; at any rate, shells were coming in pretty 
freely, and we were happier when we could run 
along under the lee of the houses. However, we 
got back to the hospital safely enough, and there 
we held a council of war. 

It was in the office, of course — the most risky 
room we could have chosen, I suppose — but some- 
how that did not seem to occur to anyone. It is 
curious how soon one grows accustomed to shells. 
At that moment a barrel-organ would have caused 
us far more annoyance. We sat round the table 

s 



114 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and discussed the situation. It was by no means 
straightforward. In the first place several mem- 
bers of the community did not wish to leave at 
all; in the second, we could not leave any of our 
wounded behind unattended; and in the third, it 
seemed unlikely that we could get them all on to 
four buses. After a long discussion we decided to 
go again and see General Paris, to ask for absolute 
instructions as a hospital under his control, and 
if he told us to go, to get sufficient transport. And 
then arose a scene which will always live in my 
mind. We had impressed into consultation a 
retired officer of distinction to whose help we owed 
much, and now owe far more, and whom I shall 
call our Friend. Perhaps he wished to give us 
confidence — I have always suspected that he had 
an ulterior motive — but he concluded the discus- 
sion by saying that he felt hungry and would have 
something to eat before he started, and from his 
haversack he produced an enormous German 
sausage and a large loaf of bread, which he offered 
to us all round, and he said he would like a cup of 
tea ! The shells could do what they liked outside, 
and if one of them was rude enough to intrude, it 
could not be helped. We must show them that 
we could pay no attention to anything so vulgar 
and noisy. At any rate, the effect on us was elec- 
trical. The contrast between the German shells 



THE BOMBARDMENT— DAY 115 

and the German sausage was too much for us, 
and the meeting broke up in positive confusion. 
Alas ! that sausage, the unparalleled trophy of an 
incomparable moment, was left behind on the 
table, and I fear the Germans got it. 

General Paris had been obliged to shift his 
headquarters to the Pilotage, on the docks and at 
the farthest end of the city from us. He was 
very considerate, and after some discussion said 
that we had better leave Antwerp, and sent 
Colonel Farquharson with us to get six buses. 
The Pilotage is at the extreme north end of the 
Avenue des Arts, which extends the whole length 
of Antwerp, and the buses were on the quay by 
the Arsenal at the extreme south end, so that we 
had to drive the whole length of this, the most 
magnificent street of Antwerp, and a distance of 
about three miles. It was an extraordinary 
drive. In the whole length of that Avenue I 
do not think that we passed a single individual. 
It was utterly deserted. All around were signs 
of the bombardment — tops of houses blown off. 
and scattered about the street, trees knocked down, 
holes in the roadway where shells had struck. 
On the left stood the great Palais de Justice, with 
most of its windows broken and part of the roof 
blown away, and just beyond this three houses 
in a row blazing from cellar to chimney, the front 



116 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

wall gone, and all that remained of the rooms 
exposed. As I said, only small shells had been 
used, and the damage was nothing at all to that 
which we afterwards saw at Ypres; but it gave 
one an impression of dreariness and utter desola- 
tion that could scarcely be surpassed. Think of 
driving from Hyde Park Corner down the Strand 
to the Bank, not meeting a soul on the way, passing 
a few clubs in Piccadilly burning comfortably, the 
Cecil a blazing furnace, and the Law Courts lying 
in little bits about the street, and you will get 
some idea of what it looked like. The scream of 
the shells and the crash when they fell near by 
formed quite a suitable if somewhat Futurist 
accompaniment. 

But the climax of the entertainment, the bonne 
bouche of the afternoon, was reserved for the end 
of our drive, when we reached the wharf by the 
Arsenal, where the British stores and transport 
were collected. Here was a long row of motor- 
buses, about sixty of them, all drawn up in line 
along the river. Beside them was a long row of 
heavily loaded ammunition lorries, and on the 
other side of the road was the Arsenal, on our left, 
blazing away, with a vast column of smoke tower- 
ing up to the sky. " It may blow up any minute," 
said Colonel Farquharson cheerily, " I had better 
move that ammunition." I have never seen an 



J 




THE BOMBARDMENT— DAY 117 

arsenal blow up, and I imagine it is a phenomenon 
requiring distance to get it into proper perspective ; 
but I have some recollection of an arsenal blowing 
up in Antwerp a few years ago and taking a con- 
siderable part of the town with it. However, it 
was not our arsenal, so we waited and enjoyed 
the view till the ammunition had been moved, and 
the Colonel had done his best to get us the motor- 
buses. He could only get us four, so we had to 
make the best of a bad job. But meanwhile the 
Germans had evidently determined to give us a 
really good show while they were about it, for 
while we waited a Taube came overhead and 
hovered for a moment, apparently uncertain as to 
whether a bomb or a shell would look better 
just there. A flash of tinsel falling in the sunlight 
showed us that she had made up her mind and 
was giving the range. But we could not stay, and 
were a quarter of a mile away when we looked 
back and saw the first shells falling close to where 
we had been two minutes before. They had come 
six miles. 

The bombardment was increasing in violence, 
and large numbers of incendiary shells were being 
used, whilst in addition the houses set on fire 
during the night were now beginning to blaze. 
As we drove back we passed several houses in 
flames, and the passage of the narrow streets we 



118 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

traversed was by no means free from risk. At 
last we turned into our own street, the Boulevard 
Leopold, and there we met a sight which our eyes 
could scarcely credit. Three motor-buses stood 
before our door and patients were being crowded 
into them. Those buses and our own lives we 
owe to the kindness of Major Gordon. Without 
them some at least must have remained behind. 
The three were already well filled, for our friends 
thought that we had certainly been killed and that 
they must act for themselves. We sent them off 
under the escort of one of our cars, as it seemed 
foolish to keep them waiting in a position of 
danger. On our own four we packed all our 
remaining patients and all the hospital equipment 
we could remove. One does not waste time when 
one packs under shell fire, and at the end of three- 
quarters of an hour there was not a patient and 
very little of value in the hospital. I took charge 
of the theatre as I knew where the things went, 
and I think the British working man would have 
been rather astonished to see how fast the big 
sterilizers fell apart and the operating-tables slid 
into their cases. The windows faced shellwards, 
and I must confess that once or twice when one of 
them seemed to be coming unpleasantly near I 
took the opportunity to remove my parcels out- 
side. How the patients were got ready and 



THE BOMBARDMENT— DAY 119 

carried out and into the buses in that time is 
beyond my comprehension. But somehow it was 
managed. I took a last look round and drove 
out the last nurse who was trying to rescue some 
last " hospital comfort " for a patient, and in the 
end I was myself driven out by two indignant 
dressers who caught me trying to save the instru- 
ment sterilizer. The buses were a wonderful 
sight. Inside were some sixty patients, our share 
of the whole hundred and thirteen, and on top 
about thirty of our staff, and the strangest collec- 
tion of equipment imaginable. The largest steam 
sterilizer mounted guard in front, hoisted there 
by two sailormen of huge strength, who turned 
up from somewhere. Great bundles of blankets, 
crockery, and instruments were wedged in every- 
where, with the luggage of the staff. At the door 
of each bus was seated a nurse, like a conductor, 
to give what little attention was possible to the 
patients. It was a marvellous sight, but no cheerier 
crowd of medical students ever left the doors of a 
hospital for a Cup-tie. 



XIV 

THE NIGHT JOUENEY 

There was only one way out — by the bridge of 
boats across the Scheldt. It was a narrow plank 
road, and as vehicles had to go across in single file at 
some distance apart, the pressure can be imagined. 
For an hour and a half we stood in the densely 
packed Cathedral square watching the hands of 
the great clock go round and wondering when a 
shell would drop among us. We had seen enough 
of churches to know what an irresistible attraction 
they have for German artillery, and we knew that, 
whatever may be the state of affairs in Scotland, 
here at any rate the nearer the church the nearer 
was heaven. But no shells fell near, we only heard 
them whistling overhead. 

The scene around us was extraordinary, and 
indeed these were the remains of the entire popu- 
lation of Antwerp. The whole city had emptied 
itself either by this road or by the road north- 
wards into Holland. Crowds of people of every 
class — the poor in their working-clothes, the well- 
to-do in their Sunday best — all carrying in bundles 

120 



THE NIGHT JOURNEY 121 

all they could carry away of their property, and 
wedged in amongst them every kind of vehicle 
imaginable, from a luxurious limousine to coster's 
carts and wheelbarrows. In front of us lay the 
Scheldt, and pouring down towards it was on the 
left an endless stream of fugitives, crossing by the 
ferry-boats, and on the right an interminable 
train of artillery and troops, crossing by the only 
bridge. At last there was a movement forwards; 
we crept down the slope and on to the bridge, and 
slowly moved over to the other side. Perhaps we 
should not have felt quite so happy about it had 
we known that two men had just been caught 
on the point of blowing up the boats in the centre, 
and that very shortly after the Germans were to 
get the range and drop a shell on to the bridge. 
At five o'clock we were across the bridge and on 
the road to Ghent. 

Of all the pitiful sights I have ever seen, that 
road was the most utterly pitiful. We moved on 
slowly through a dense throng of fugitives — men, 
women, and little children — all with bundles over 
their shoulders, in which was all that they possessed. 
A woman with three babies clinging to her skirts, 
a small boy wheeling his grandmother in a wheel- 
barrow, family after family, all moving away 
from the horror that lay behind to the misery that 
lay in front. We had heard of Lou vain, and we 



122 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

had seen Termonde, and we understood. As dark- 
ness came down we lit our lamps, and there along 
the roadside sat rows of fugitives, resting before 
recommencing their long journey through the 
night. There was one row of little children which 
will live for ever in my memory, tiny mites sitting 
together on a bank by the roadside. We only saw 
them for an instant as our lights fell on them, and 
they disappeared in the darkness. Germany will 
have to pay for Louvain and Termonde. It is not 
with man that she will have to settle for that row 
of little children. 

We had a few vacant seats when we left Ant- 
werp, but they were soon filled by fugitives whom 
we picked up on the road. Strangely enough, we 
picked up two of our friends in Antwerp with their 
families. One was the doctor who had taken all 
our radiographs for us, and to whom we owed a 
great deal in many ways. He had left his beauti- 
ful house, with X-ray apparatus on which he had 
spent his fortune, incomparably superior to any 
other that I have ever seen, and here he was 
trudging along the road, with his wife, his two 
children, and their nurse. They were going to St. 
Nicholas, on their way to Holland, and were de- 
lighted to get a lift. Unfortunately, by some 
mistake, the nurse and children left the bus at 
Zwyndrecht, a few miles from Antwerp, the doctor 



THE NIGHT JOURNEY 123 

came on to St. Nicholas, and his wife went right 
through with us to Ghent. It took him three days 
to find the children, and when we last heard from 
him he was in Holland, having lost everything he 
had in the world, and after two months he had 
not yet found his wife. And this is only an 
instance of what has happened all over Belgium. 

We reached St. Nicholas about eight o'clock, 
having covered thirteen miles in three hours. It 
was quite dark, and as we had a long night before 
us we decided to stop and get some food for our- 
selves and our patients. There was not much to 
be had, but, considering the stream of fugitives, 
it was wonderful that there was anything. We 
hoped now to be able to push on faster, and to 
reach Ghent before midnight, for it is only a little 
over twenty miles by the direct road. To our 
dismay, we found that Lokeren, half-way to 
Ghent, was in the hands of the Germans, and 
that we must make a detour, taking us close to 
the Dutch border, and nearly doubling the dis- 
tance. Without a guide, and in the dark, we 
could never have reached our destination; but we 
were fortunate enough to get a guide, and we set 
out on our long drive through the night. Twenty 
minutes later a German scouting party entered 
St. Nicholas. It was a narrow margin, but it was 
sufficient. 



124 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

We were rather a downhearted party when we 
set out northwards towards the Dutch frontier, 
for we had been told that the three buses we had 
sent on in advance had gone straight on to Lokeren, 
and had undoubtedly fallen into the hands of the 
Germans, who had made certain of holding the 
road by destroying the bridge. We hoped that 
they might have discovered this in time, and 
turned back, but we could not wait to find out. 
We knew that the enemy were quite close. At 
first we used our lights, but a shrapnel whistling 
overhead warned us that we were seen, and for 
the remainder of the night we travelled in dark- 
ness. These were minor roads, with a narrow 
paved causeway in the centre, and loose sand on 
each side. Long avenues of trees kept us in inky 
darkness, and how the drivers succeeded in keeping 
on the causeway I really do not know. Every 
now and then one of the buses would get into the 
sand; then all the men would collect, dig the 
wheels clear, and by sheer brute force drag the 
bus back to safety. Twice it seemed absolutely 
hopeless. The wheels were in the loose sand 
within a foot of a deep ditch, and the least thing 
would have sent the bus flying over on to its side 
into the field beyond; and on both occasions, 
while we looked at one another in despair, a team 
of huge Flemish horses appeared from nowhere in 



THE NIGHT JOURNEY 125 

the darkness and dragged us clear. Think of an 
inky night, the Germans close at hand, and every 
half-hour or so a desperate struggle to shoulder a 
heavily loaded London bus out of a ditch, and 
you may have some faint idea of the nightmare 
we passed through. 

As we crept along the dark avenues, the sky 
behind us was lit by an ever-increasing glare. 
Away to the south-east, at no great distance, a 
village was blazing, but behind us was a vast 
column of flame and smoke towering up to heaven. 
It was in the direction of Antwerp, and at first 
we thought that the vandals had fired the town; 
but though the sky was lit by many blazing houses, 
that tall pillar came from the great oil- tanks, set 
on fire by the Belgians lest they should fall into 
German hands. A more awful and terrifying 
spectacle it is hard to conceive. The sky was lit 
up as if by the sunrise of the day of doom, and 
thirty miles away our road was lighted by the 
lurid glare. Our way led through woods, and 
amongst the trees we could hear the crack and 
see the flash of rifle-fire. More than once the 
whiz of a bullet urged us to hurry on. 

At Selsaete, only a mile from the Dutch frontier, 
we turned southwards towards Ghent, and for an 
interminable distance we followed the bank of a 
large canal. A few miles from Ghent we met 



126 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Commander Samson, of the Flying Corps, and 
three of his armoured cars. The blaze of their 
headlights quite blinded us after the darkness in 
which we had travelled, but the sight of the 
British uniforms and the machine guns was a 
great encouragement. The road was so narrow 
that they had to turn their cars into a field to let 
us pass. We had just come up with a number of 
farm waggons, and the clumsy Flemish carts, with 
their huge horses, the grey armoured cars, with 
their blazing headlights, and our four red motor- 
buses, made a strange scene in the darkness of the 
night. At last we reached Ghent utterly tired 
out, though personally I had slept a sort of night- 
mare sleep on the top step of a bus which boldly 
announced its destination as Hendon. It was 
five o'clock, and day was breaking as we got our 
patients out of the buses and deposited them in 
the various hospitals as we could find room for 
them. To our unspeakable relief, we found that 
the rest of our party had come through by much 
the same road as we had taken ourselves, but 
they had reached Ghent quite early the night 
before. Their earlier start had given them the 
advantage of clearer roads and daylight. With 
good fortune little short of miraculous, we had all 
come so far in safety, and we hoped that our 
troubles were over. Alas ! we were told that the 



THE NIGHT JOURNEY 127 

Germans were expected to enter Ghent that very 
day, and that all British wounded must be re- 
moved from the hospitals before ten o'clock. 
There was nothing for it but to collect them again, 
and to take them on to Ostend. One had died in 
the night, and two were too ill to be moved. We 
left them behind in skilled hands, and the others 
we re-embarked on our buses en route for Bruges 
and Ostend. 

The First Act in the story of the British Field 
Hospital for Belgium was drawing to an end. 
Our hospital, to which we had given so much 
labour, was gone, and the patients, for whom we 
had grown to care, were scattered. Yet there 
was in our hearts only a deep gratitude that we 
had come unharmed, almost by a miracle, through 
so many dangers, and a firm confidence that in 
some other place we should find a home for our 
hospital, where we could again help the brave 
soldiers whose cause had become so much our 
own. 



XV 

FURNES 

A week after we had reached London, we were 
off again to the front. This time our objective 
was Furnes, a little town fifteen miles east of 
Dunkirk, and about five miles from the fighting- 
line. The line of the Belgian trenches ran in a 
circle, following the course of the River Yser, the 
little stream which has proved such an insuperable 
barrier to the German advance. Furnes lies at 
the centre of the circle, and is thus an ideal posi- 
tion for an advanced base, such as we intended 
to establish. It is easy of access from Dunkirk 
by a fine main road which runs alongside an im- 
portant canal, and as Dunkirk was our port, and 
the only source of our supplies, this was a great 
consideration. From Furnes a number of roads 
lead in various directions to Ypres, Dixmude, 
Nieuport, and the coast, making it a convenient 
centre for an organization such as ours, requiring, 
as we did, ready means of reaching the front in 
any direction, and open communication with our 

base of supplies. 

128 



FURNES 129 

We crossed from Dover in the Government 
transport, and arrived at Dunkirk about ten 
o'clock on Tuesday morning. There we met Dr. 
Munro's party, the famous Flying Ambulance 
Corps, with whom we were to enter on our new 
venture. They had not come over to England 
at all, but had come down the coast in their cars, 
and had spent the last few days in Malo, the sea- 
side suburb of Dunkirk. The Belgian Govern- 
ment very kindly lent us a couple of big motor- 
lorries in which to take out our stores, and with 
our own motors we made quite a procession as we 
started off from the wharf of Dunkirk on our 
fifteen-mile drive to Furnes. It was late in the 
afternoon when we reached our new home. It 
was a large school, partly occupied by the priests 
connected with it, partly by officers quartered 
there, and one of the larger classrooms had been 
used as a dressing-station by some Belgian doctors 
in Furnes. For ourselves, the only accommoda- 
tion consisted of a few empty classrooms and a 
huge dormitory divided into cubicles, but other- 
wise destitute of the necessaries for sleep. Several 
hours' hard work made some change in the scene, 
mattresses and blankets being hauled up to the 
dormitory, where the nursing staff was accommo- 
dated, while straw laid down in one of the class- 
rooms made comfortable if somewhat primitive 

9 



130 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

beds for the male members. Meanwhile, in the 
kitchen department miracles had been accom- 
plished, and we all sat down to dinner with an 
appetite such as one rarely feels at home, and for 
which many of our patients over in England would 
be willing to pay quite large sums. The large 
room was lit by two candles and a melancholy 
lamp, there was no tablecloth, the spoons were of 
pewter, with the bowls half gone, and the knives 
were in their dotage. But the scales had fallen 
from our eyes, and we realized what trifles these 
things are. Madame, the genius who presided 
over our domestic affairs, and many other affairs 
as well, and her assistants, had produced from 
somewhere food, good food, and plenty of it; and 
what in the world can a hungry man want more ? 
Truly there are many people who require a moral 
operation for cataract, that they might see how 
good is the world in which they live. 

Next day we proceeded to unpack our stores, 
and to try to make a hospital out of these empty 
rooms, and then only did we discover that an 
overwhelming misfortune had overtaken us. By 
some extraordinary circumstance which has never 
been explained, we had lost practically the whole 
of the surgical instruments which we had brought 
out of Antwerp with such trouble and risk. They 
were tied up in sheets, and my own impression is 



FURNES 131 

that they were stolen. However that may be, 
here we were in as ludicrous a position as it is 
possible for even a hospital to occupy, for not 
only had we none of the ordinary instruments, 
but, as if Fate meant to have a good laugh at us, 
we had a whole series of rare and expensive tools. 
We had no knives, and no artery forceps, and not 
a stitch of catgut; but we had an cesophagoscope, 
and the very latest possible pattern of cystoscope, 
and a marvellous set of tools for plating fractures. 
It reminded one of the costume of an African 
savage — a silk hat, and nothing else. Some 
Belgian doctors who had been working there lent 
us a little case of elementary instruments, and 
that was absolutely all we had. 

Scarcely had we made this terrible discovery, 
when an ambulance arrived with two wounded 
officers, and asked if we were ready to admit 
patients. We said, " No," and I almost think 
that we were justified. The men in charge of the 
ambulance seemed very disappointed, and said 
that in that case there was nothing for it but to 
leave the wounded men on their stretchers till an 
ambulance train should come to take them to 
Calais, which they might ultimately reach in two 
or three days' time. They were badly wounded, 
and we thought that at least we could do better 
than that; so we made up a couple of beds in one 



132 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

of the empty rooms, and took them in. Little 
did we dream of what we were in for. An hour 
later another ambulance arrived, and as we had 
started, we thought that we might as well fill up 
the ward we had begun. That did it. The sluice- 
gates were opened, and the wounded poured in. 
In four days we admitted three hundred and fifty 
patients, all of them with injuries of the most 
terrible nature. The cases we had seen at Ant- 
werp were nothing to these. Arms and legs were 
torn right off or hanging by the merest shreds, 
ghastly wounds of the head left the brain exposed. 
Many of the poor fellows were taken from the 
ambulances dead, and of the others at least half 
must have died. For four days and four nights 
the operating theatre was at work continuously, 
till one sickened at the sight of blood and at the 
thought of an operation. Three operating tables 
were in almost continuous use, and often three 
major operations were going on at the same time; 
and all the instruments we had were two scalpels, 
six artery forceps, two dissecting forceps, and a 
finger- saw. Think of doing amputations through 
the thigh with that equipment ! There was 
nothing else for it. Either the work had to be 
done or the patients had to die. And there was 
certainly no one else to do it. 

The rapid advance of the Germans had swept 




Dinner. Furnes. 




The Courtyard. Furnes. 



FURNES 133 

away all the admirable arrangements which the 
Belgian Army had made for dealing with its 
wounded. The splendid hospitals of Ghent and 
Ostend were now in German hands, and there had 
not yet been time to get new ones established. 
The cases could be sent to Calais, it was true, but 
there the accommodation was so far totally in- 
adequate, and skilled surgical assistance was not 
to be obtained. For the moment our hospital, 
with its ludicrous equipment, was the only hope 
of the badly wounded. By the mercy of Heaven, 
we had plenty of chloroform and morphia, and a 
fair supply of dressings, and we knew by experi- 
ence that at this stage it is safer to be content 
with the minimum of actual operative work, so 
that I think it was we, rather than our patients, 
who suffered from the want of the ordinary aids 
of surgery. In the wards there was a shortage, 
almost as serious, of all the ordinary equipment 
of nursing, for much of this had been too cum- 
brous to bring from Antwerp; and though we had 
brought out a fair supply of ordinary require- 
ments, we had never dreamt of having to deal 
with such a rush as this. Ward equipment can- 
not be got at a moment's notice, and the bulk of 
it had not yet arrived. We only possessed a 
dozen folding beds, in which some of the worst 
cases were placed. The others had to lie on straw 



134 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

on the floor, and so closely were they packed that 
it was only with the greatest care that one could 
thread one's way across the ward. How the 
nurses ever managed to look after their patients 
is beyond my comprehension, but they were mag- 
nificent. They rose to the emergency as only 
Englishwomen can, and there is not one of those 
unfortunate men who will not remember with 
gratitude their sympathy and their skill. 

During these first days a terrific fight was going 
on around Dixmude and Nieuport, and it was a 
very doubtful question how long it would be pos- 
sible for the Belgian and French troops to with- 
stand the tremendous attacks to which they were 
being subjected. The matter was so doubtful 
that we had to hold ourselves in readiness to clear 
out from the hospital at two hours' notice, whilst 
our wounded were taken away as fast as we could 
get them into what one can only describe as a 
portable condition. It was a physical impossi- 
bility for our wards to hold more than a hundred 
and fifty patients, even when packed close together 
side by side on the floor, and as I have said, three 
hundred and fifty were dealt with in the first four 
days. This meant that most of them spent only 
twenty-four hours in the hospital, and as we were 
only sent cases which could not, as they stood, 
survive the long train journey to Calais, this 



FURNES 135 

meant that they were often taken on almost im- 
mediately after serious operations. Several am- 
putations of the thigh, for example, were taken 
away next day, and many of them must have 
spent the next twenty-four hours in the train, for 
the trains were very tardy in reaching their 
destination. It is not good treatment, but good 
surgery is not the primary object of war. The 
fighting troops are the first consideration, and the 
surgeon has to manage the best way he can. 

One of the most extraordinary cases we took in 
was that of the editor of a well-known sporting 
journal in England. He had shown his apprecia- 
tion of the true sporting instinct by going out to 
Belgium and joining the army as a mitrailleuse 
man. If there is one place where one may hope 
for excitement, it is in an armoured car with a 
mitrailleuse. The mitrailleuse men are picked 
dare-devils, and their work takes them constantly 
into situations which require a trained taste for 
their enjoyment. Our friend the editor was out 
with his car, and had got out to reconnoitre, when 
suddenly some Germans in hiding opened fire. 
Their first shot went through both his legs, frac- 
turing both tibiae, and he fell down, of course 
absolutely incapable of standing, just behind the 
armoured car. Owing to some mistake, an officer 
in the car gave the order to start, and away went 



136 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

the car. He would have been left to his fate, but 
suddenly realizing how desperate his position was, 
he threw up his hand and caught hold of one of 
the rear springs. Lying on his back and holding 
on to the spring, he was dragged along the ground, 
with both his legs broken, for a distance of about 
half a mile. The car was going at about twenty- 
five miles an hour, and how he ever maintained 
his hold Heaven only knows. At last they pulled 
up, and there they found him, practically uncon- 
scious, his clothes torn to ribbons, his back a mass 
of bruises, but still holding on. It was one of the 
most splendid examples of real British grit of 
which I have ever heard. They brought him to 
the hospital, and we fixed him up as well as we 
could. One would have thought that he might 
have been a little downhearted, but not a bit of 
it. He arrived in the operating theatre smiling 
and smoking a cigar, and gave us a vivid account 
of his experiences. We sent him over to England, 
and I heard that he was doing well. There is one 
sporting paper in England which is edited by a 
real sportsman. May he long live to inspire in 
others the courage of which he has given such a 
splendid example ! 



XVI 

POPERINGHE 

For a long week the roar of guns had echoed 
incessantly in our corridors and wards, and a con- 
tinuous stream of motor-lorries, guns, and ammu- 
nition waggons had rumbled past our doors; 
whilst at night the flash of the guns lit up the 
horizon with an angry glare. The flood of wounded 
had abated, and we were just beginning to get the 
hospital into some sort of shape when the order 
came to evacuate. 

It had been no easy task transforming bare 
rooms into comfortable wards, arranging for sup- 
plies of food and stores, and fitting a large staff 
into a cubic space totally inadequate to hold them. 
But wonderful things can be accomplished when 
everyone is anxious to do their share, and the most 
hopeless sybarite will welcome shelter however 
humble, and roll himself up in a blanket in any 
corner, when he is dead tired. For the first few 
days the rush of wounded had been so tremendous 
that all we could do was to try to keep our heads 
above water and not be drowned by the flood. 

137 



138 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

But towards the end of the week the numbers 
diminished, not because there were not as many 
wounded, but because the situation was so critical 
that the Belgian authorities did not dare to leave 
any large number of wounded in Eurnes. Sup- 
plies were coming out from England in response 
to urgent telegrams, and, through the kind offices 
of the Queen of the Belgians, we had been able to 
obtain a number of beds from the town, in addition 
to twenty which she had generously given to us 
herself. So that we were gradually beginning to 
take on the appearance of an ordinary hospital, 
and work was settling down into a regular routine. 
The sleepy little town of Furnes had been for 
some weeks in a state of feverish activity. After 
the evacuation of Antwerp and the retirement 
of the Belgian Army from Ostend, it had become 
the advanced base of the Belgian troops, and it 
was very gay with Staff officers, and of course 
packed with soldiers. The immense Grand Place 
lined with buildings, in many cases bearing un- 
mistakable signs of a birth in Spanish times, was 
a permanent garage of gigantic dimensions, and 
the streets were thronged day and night with 
hurrying cars. We in the hospital hoped that the 
passage of the Yser would prove too much for the 
Germans, and that we should be left in peace, 
for we could not bear to think that all our labour 



POPERINGHE 139 

could be thrown to the winds, and that we might 
have to start afresh in some other place. But one 
of the massed attacks which have formed such a 
prominent feature of this terrible war had tem- 
porarily rolled back the defence in the Dixmude 
district, and it was deemed unwise to submit the 
hospital to the risk of possible disaster. 

We were fortunate in having Dr. Munro's am- 
bulance at our disposal, and in rather over two 
hours more than a hundred wounded had been 
transferred to the Red Cross train which lay at 
the station waiting to take them to Calais. An 
evacuation is always a sad business, for the rela- 
tions between a hospital and its patients are far 
more than professional. But with us it was 
tragic, for we knew that for many of our patients 
the long journey could have only one conclusion. 
Only the worst cases were ever brought to us, in 
fact only those whose condition rendered the long 
journey to Calais a dangerous proceeding, and we 
felt that for many of them the evacuation order 
was a death warrant, and that we should never 
see them again. They were brave fellows, and 
made the best of it as they shook hands with 
smiling faces and wished us " Au revoir," for 
though they might die on the way they preferred 
that to the danger of falling into the hands of the 
Germans. And they were right. They knew as 



140 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

well as we did that we are not fighting against a 
civilized nation, but against a gang of organized 
savages. 

Three hours later we were mingling with the 
crowds who thronged the road, wondering with 
them where our heads would rest that night, and 
filled with pity at the terrible tragedy which sur- 
rounded us. Carts, wheelbarrows, perambulators, 
and in fact any vehicle which could be rolled 
along, were piled to overflowing with household 
goods. Little children and old men and women 
struggled along under loads almost beyond their 
powers, none of them knowing whither they went 
or what the curtain of fate would reveal when 
next it was drawn aside. It was a blind flight into 
the darkness of the unknown. 

Our orders were to make for Poperinghe, a little 
town lying about fifteen miles due south of 
Furnes, in the direction of Ypres. For the first 
ten miles we travelled along the main road to 
Ypres, a fine avenue running between glorious 
trees, and one of the chief thoroughfares of 
Belgium. Here we made our first acquaintance 
with the African troops, who added a touch of 
colour in their bright robes to the otherwise grey 
surroundings. They were encamped in the fields 
by the side of the road, and seemed to be lazily 
enjoying themselves seated round their camp- 



POPERINGHE 141 

fires. At Oostvleteren we parted company with 
the main road and its fine surface, and for the 
next six miles we bumped and jolted along on 
a bad cross-road till our very bones rattled and 
groaned. 

There was no suggestion now of the horrors of 
war. Peaceful villages as sleepy as any in our 
own country districts appeared at frequent in- 
tervals, and easy prosperity was the obvious key- 
note of the well-wooded and undulating country- 
side. We were in one of the great hop districts, 
and the contrast with the flat and unprotected 
country round Furnes was striking. One might 
almost have been in the sheltered hopfields 
of Kent. Little children looked up from their 
games in astonishment as we rolled by, and our 
response to their greetings was mingled with a 
silent prayer that they might be spared the terrible 
fate which had befallen their brothers and sisters 
in far-off Louvain. The contrasts of war are 
amazing. Here were the children playing by the 
roadside, and the cattle slowly wending their 
way home, and ten miles away we could hear the 
roar of the guns, and knew that on those wasted 
fields men were struggling with savage fury in 
one of the bloodiest battles of the war. 

In the great square of Poperinghe the scene 
was brilliant in the extreme. Uniforms of every 



142 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

conceivable cut and colour rubbed shoulder to 
shoulder; ambulance waggons, guns, ammunition 
trains, and picketed horses all seemed to be 
mixed in inextricable confusion ; while a squadron 
of French cavalry in their bright blue and silver 
uniforms was drawn up on one side of the square, 
waiting patiently for the orders which would 
permit them to go to the help of their hard-pressed 
comrades. It seemed impossible that we could 
find shelter here, for obviously every corner must 
have been filled by the throng of soldiers who 
crowded in the square. But we were quite happy, 
for had we not got Madame with us, and had her 
genius ever been known to fail, especially in the 
face of the impossible ? Others might go without 
a roof, but not we, and others might go to bed 
supperless, but in some miraculous way we knew 
that we should sit down to a hot dinner. We 
were not deceived. The whole nursing staff was 
soon comfortably housed in a girls' school, while 
the men were allotted the outhouse of a convent, 
and there, rolled up in our blankets and with our 
bags for pillows, we slept that night as soundly 
as we should have done in our own comfortable 
beds in England. 

There was ample room in the courtyard for our 
heavily laden ambulances, for we had brought all 
our stores with us ; and a big pump was a welcome 



POPERINGHE 143 

sight, for grime had accumulated during the 
preceding twelve hours. By the side of the 
friendly pump, in a railed-off recess, a life-size 
image of Our Lady of Lourdes, resplendent in 
blue and gold, looked down with a pitying smile 
on a group of pilgrims, one of whom bore a little 
child in her arms; whilst a well-worn stone step 
spoke of the number of suppliants who had sought 
her aid. 

We had fasted for many hours, and while we 
were doing our part in unpacking the small store 
of food which we had brought with us, Madame, 
with her usual genius, had discovered on the out- 
skirts of Poperinghe an obscure cafe, where for a 
small sum the proprietor allowed us to use his 
kitchen. There we were presently all seated 
round three tables, drinking coffee such as we had 
rarely tasted, and eating a curiously nondescript, 
but altogether delightful, meal. There were two 
little rooms, one containing a bar and a stove, 
the other only a table. Over the stove presided 
a lady whose novels we have all read, cooking 
bacon, and when I say that she writes novels as 
well as she cooks bacon it is very high praise 
indeed— at least we thought so at the time. Some 
genius had discovered a naval store in the town, 
and had persuaded the officer in charge to give us 
cheese and jam and a whole side of bacon, so that 



144 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

we fed like the gods. There was one cloud over 
the scene, for the terrible discovery was made 
that we had left behind in Furnes a large box 
of sausages, over the fate of which it is well to 
draw a veil; but Madame was not to be defeated 
even by that, and a wonderful salad made of 
biscuits and vinegar and oil went far to console 
us. And that reminds me of a curious episode 
in Furnes. For several days the huge store bottle 
of castor oil was lost. It was ultimately discovered 
in the kitchen, where, as the label was in English, 
it had done duty for days as salad oil ! What is 
there in a name after all ? 

We had not been able to bring with us all our 
stores, and as some of these were wanted two of 
us started back to Furnes late at night to fetch 
them. It was a glorious night, and one had the 
advantage of a clear road. We were driving 
northwards, and the sky was lit up by the flashes 
of the guns at Nieuport and Dixmude, whilst we 
could hear their dull roar in the distance. All 
along the road were encamped the Turcos, and 
their camp-fires, with the dark forms huddled 
around them, gave a picturesque touch to the 
scene. Half-way to Furnes the road was lit up 
by a motor-car which had caught fire, and which 
stood blazing in the middle of the road. We had 
some little difficulty in passing it, but when we 



POPERINGHE 145 

returned it was only a mass of twisted iron by 
the roadside. There was no moon, but the stars 
shone out all the more brilliantly as we spun along 
on the great Ypres road. It was long after mid- 
night when we reached the hospital, and it was 
not a little uncann}^ groping through its wards in 
the darkness. There is some influence which seems 
to haunt the empty places where men once lived, 
but it broods in redoubled force over the places 
where men have died. In those wards, now so 
dark and silent, we had worked for all the past 
days amid sights which human eyes should never 
have seen, and the groans of suffering we had 
heard seemed to echo through the darkness. We 
were glad when we had collected the stores we 
required and were again in the car on our way 
back to Poperinghe. 

Next morning we called at the Hotel de Ville 
in Poperinghe, and there we learnt that the Queen, 
with her usual thoughtfulness, was interesting 
herself on our behalf to find us a building in 
which we could make a fresh start. She had sent 
the Viscomtesse de S. to tell us that she hoped 
to shortly place at our disposal either a school or 
a convent. On the following day, however, we 
heard that the situation had somewhat settled, 
and an order came from General Mellis, the Chief 
of the Medical Staff, instructing us to return to 

10 



146 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Furnes. A few hours later found us hard at 
work again, putting in order our old home. 

There was one rather pathetic incident of our 
expedition to Poperinghe. Five nuns who had 
fled from Eastern Belgium — they had come, I 
think, from a convent near Louvain — had taken 
refuge in the school in Furnes in which we were 
established. When we were ordered to go to 
Poperinghe, they begged to be allowed to accom- 
pany us, and we took them with us in the ambu- 
lances. On our return they were so grateful that 
they asked to be allowed to show their gratitude 
by working for us in the kitchen, and for all the 
time we were at Furnes they were our devoted 
helpers. They only made one request, that if we 
left Furnes we would take them with us, and we 
promised that we would never desert them. 



XVII 

FURNES AGAIN 

The position of the hospital at Furnes was very 
different from that which it had held at Antwerp. 
There we were in a modern city, with a water- 
supply and modern sanitary arrangements. Here 
we were in an old Continental country town, or, in 
other words, in medieval times, as far as water and 
sanitation were concerned. For it is only where 
the English tourist has penetrated that one can 
possibly expect such luxuries. One does not 
usually regard him as an apostle of civilization, 
but he ought certainly to be canonized as the 
patron saint of continental sanitary engineering. 
As a matter of fact, in a country as flat as Belgium 
the science must be fraught with extraordinary 
difficulties, and they certainly seem to thrive very 
well without it. We were established in the 
Episcopal College of St. Joseph, a large boys' 
school, and not badly adapted to the needs of a 
hospital but for the exceptions I have mentioned. 
Our water-supply came, on a truly hygienic plan, 
from wells beneath the building, whilst we were 

147 



148 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

entirely free from any worry about drains. There 
were none. However, it did not seem to afleet 
either ourselves or our patients, and we all had 
the best of health, though we took the precaution 
of sterilizing our water. 

We were now the official advanced base hospital 
of the Belgian Army, and not merely, as in 
Antwerp, a free organization working by itself. 
The advantage of this arrangement was that we 
had a constant supply of wounded sent to us when- 
ever there was any fighting going on, and that the 
evacuation of our patients was greatly facilitated. 
Every morning at ten o'clock Colonel Maestrio 
made the tour of our wards, and arranged for the 
removal to the base hospital at Dunkirk of all 
whom we wished to send away. It gave us the 
further advantage of special privileges for our cars 
and ambulances, which were allowed to go prac- 
tically anywhere in search of the wounded with 
absolute freedom. Formerly we had owed a great 
deal to the assistance of the Belgian Croix Rouge, 
who had been very good in supplementing our 
supply of dressings, as well as in getting us army 
rations for the patients. This, of course, had all 
come to an end, and we now had to rely on our 
own resources. 

Our personnel had undergone considerable alter- 
ation, for while several of our original members 



FURNES AGAIN 149 

had dropped out, we had joined forces with Dr. 
Hector Munro's Ambulance Corps, and four of 
their doctors had joined our medical staff. Dr. 
Munro and his party had worked in connection 
with the hospitals of Ghent till the German ad- 
vance forced both them and ourselves to retreat 
to Ostend. There we met and arranged to carry 
on our work together at Furnes. The arrange- 
ment was of the greatest possible advantage to 
both of us, for it gave us the service of their splen- 
did fleet of ambulances, and it gave them a base 
to which to bring their wounded. We were thus 
able to get the wounded into hospital in an un- 
usually short space of time, and to deal effectively 
with many cases which would otherwise have 
been hopeless. Smooth co-ordination with an 
ambulance party is, in fact, the first essential for 
the satisfactory working of an advanced hospital. 
If full use is to be made of its advantages, the 
wounded must be collected and brought in with 
the minimum of delay, whilst it must be possible 
to evacuate at once all who are fit to be moved 
back to the base. In both respects we were at 
Furnes exceptionally well placed. 

We were established in a large straggling build- 
ing of no attraction whatever except its cubic 
capacity. It was fairly new, and devoid of any 
of the interest of antiquity, but it presented none 



150 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

of the advantages of modern architecture. In 
fact, it was extremely ugly and extremely incon- 
venient, but it was large. Two of the largest 
classrooms and the refectory were converted into 
wards. At first the question of beds was a serious 
difficulty, but by the kind intervention of the 
Queen we were able to collect a number from 
houses in the town, whilst Her Majesty herself 
gave us twenty first-class beds with box-spring 
mattresses. Later on we got our supplies from 
England, and we could then find beds for a hun- 
dred patients. Even then we were not at the end 
of our capacity, for we had two empty classrooms, 
the floors of which we covered with straw, on 
which another fifty patients could lie in comfort 
until we could find better accommodation for 
them. We could not, of course, have fires in these 
rooms, as it would have been dangerous, but we 
warmed them by the simple plan of filling them 
with patients and shutting all the windows and 
doors. For the first few nights, as a matter of 
fact, we had to sleep in these rooms on straw our- 
selves, and in the greatest luxury. No one who 
has slept all his life in a bed would ever realize how 
comfortable straw is, and for picturesqueness has 
it an equal ? I went into the Straw Ward on my 
round one wild and stormy night. Outside the 
wind was raging and the rain fell in torrents, and 



FURNES AGAIN 151 

it was so dark that one had to feel for the door. 
Inside a dozen men lay covered up with blankets 
on a thick bed of straw, most of them fast asleep, 
while beside one knelt a nurse with a stable lan- 
tern, holding a cup to his lips. It was a picture 
that an artist might have come far to see — the 
wounded soldiers in their heavy coats, covered by 
the brown blankets ; the nurse in her blue uniform 
and her white cap, the stable lantern throwing 
flickering shadows on the walls. It was some- 
thing more than art, and as I glanced up at the 
crucifix hanging on the wall I felt that the picture 
was complete. 

Above the two larger wards was a huge dormi- 
tory, divided up by wooden partitions into some 
sixty cubicles, which provided sleeping accommo- 
dation for the bulk of our staff. They were ar- 
ranged in four ranks, with passages between and 
washing arrangements in the passages, and the 
cubicles themselves were large and comfortable. 
It was really quite well planned, and was most 
useful to us, though ventilation had evidently not 
appealed to its architect. Two rows were reserved 
for the nurses, and in the others slept our chauf- 
feurs and stretcher-bearers, with a few of the 
priests. Our friends were at first much shocked 
at the idea of this mixed crowd, but as a matter 
of fact it worked very well, and there was very 



152 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

little to grumble at. The only real disadvantage 
was the noise made by early risers in the morning, 
convincing us more than ever of the essential 
selfishness of the early bird. A few of us occupied 
separate rooms over in the wing which the priests 
had for the most part reserved for themselves, and 
these we used in the daytime as our offices. 

But the real sights of our establishment were our 
kitchen and our chef; we might almost have been 
an Oxford college. Maurice had come to us in 
quite a romantic way. One night we took in a 
soldier with a bullet wound of the throat. For 
some days he was pretty bad, but he won all our 
hearts by his cheerfulness and pluck. When at 
last he improved sufficiently to be able to speak, 
he told us that he was the assistant chef at the 
Hotel Metropole in Brussels. We decided that 
he ought to be kept in a warm, moist atmosphere 
for a long time, and he was installed in the kitchen. 
He was a genius at making miracles out of nothing, 
and his soups made out of bacon rind and old 
bones, followed by entrees constructed from bully 
beef, were a dream. He was assisted by the 
nuns from Louvain who had accompanied us to 
Poperinghe, and who now worked for us on the 
sole condition that we should not desert them. 
They were very picturesque working in the kitchen 
in their black cloaks and coifs. At meal-times the 




Maurice. 





1 


1 

A 


Stefan ■*" Hfcs-,-' IV jfvG 


m^^tttl 


^^H^^^ ^B^LWH ^^^^^Hhfll ■'^iftp^'i .'^tf/* 



A S i' raw Ward. Furne.s 



FURNES AGAIN 153 

scene was a most animated one, for, as we had no 
one to wait on us, we all came in one after the 
other, plate in hand, while Maurice stood with his 
ladle and presided over the ceremonies, with a 
cheery word for everyone, assisted by the silent 
nuns. 

The getting of supplies became at times a very 
serious question. Needless to say, Furnes was 
destitute of anything to eat, drink, burn, or wear, 
and Dunkirk was soon in a similar case. We had 
to get most of our provisions over from England, 
and our milk came every morning on the Govern- 
ment transport, from Aylesbury. For some weeks 
we were very hard up, but the officer in charge of 
the naval stores at Dunkirk was very good to us, 
and supplied us with bully beef, condensed milk, 
cheese, soap, and many other luxuries till we 
could get further supplies from home. We used 
a considerable quantity of coal, and on one occa- 
sion we were faced by the prospect of an early 
famine, for Furnes and Dunkirk were empty. 
But nothing was ever too great a strain for the 
resources of our housekeeper. She discovered 
that there was a coal-heap at Ramscapelle, five 
miles away, and in a few hours an order had been 
obtained from the Juge d'Instruction empowering 
us to take the coal if we could get it, and the loan 
of a Government lorry had been coaxed out of the 



154 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

War Lords. The only difficulty was that for the 
moment the Germans were shelling the place, and 
it was too dangerous to go near even for coal; so 
the expedition had to be postponed until they 
desisted. It seemed to me the most original 
method of filling one's coal-cellar of which I had 
ever heard. And it was typical of a large number 
of our arrangements. There is something of the 
Oriental about the Belgians and the French. If 
we wanted any special favour, the very last thing 
we thought of doing was to go and ask for it. It 
was not that they were not willing to give us what 
we asked for, but they did not understand that 
method of approach. What we did was to go to 
breakfast with the Juge, or to lunch with the 
Minister, or to invite the Colonel to dinner. In 
the course of conversation the subject would be 
brought up in some indirect way till the interest 
of the great man had been gained; then everything 
was easy. And surely there is something very 
attractive about a system where everything is 
done as an act of friendship, and not as the soulless 
reflex of some official machine. It is easier to 
drink red wine than to eat red tape, and not nearly 
so wearing to one's digestion. 

As we were fifteen miles from Dunkirk, and as 
everything had to be brought out from there, 
transport was a serious problem. Every morning 



FURNES AGAIN 155 

one of our lorries started for our seaport soon after 
nine, carrying the hospital mailbag and as many 
messages as a village carrier. The life of the driver 
was far more exciting than his occupation would 
suggest, and it was always a moot point whether 
or not he would succeed in getting back the same 
night. The road was of the usual Belgian type, 
with a paved causeway in the middle just capable 
of allowing two motors to pass, and on each side 
was a morass, flanked on the right by a canal and 
on the left by a field. The slightest deviation 
from the greasy cobbles landed the car in the mud, 
with quite a chance of a plunge into the canal. A 
constant stream of heavy army lorries tore along 
the road at thirty or more miles an hour, and as a 
rule absolutely refused to give way. It took a 
steady nerve to face them, encouraged as one was 
by numbers of derelicts in the field on the one side 
and half in the canal on the other. On one bridge 
a car hung for some days between heaven and 
earth, its front wheels caught over the parapet, 
and the car hanging from them over the canal — a 
heartening sight for a nervous driver. It was 
rarely that our lorry returned without some tale 
of adventure. The daily round, the common task, 
gave quite enough occupation to one member of 
the community. 



XVIII 

WORK AT FURNES 

Our work at Furnes differed in many ways from 
that at Antwerp. All its conditions were rougher, 
and, as we had to deal with a number of patients 
out of all proportion to our size, it was impossible 
to keep any but a few special cases for any length 
of time. We admitted none but the most serious 
cases, such as would be instantly admitted to any 
London hospital, and when I mention that in 
five weeks we had just a thousand cases in our 
hundred beds, the pressure at which the work was 
carried on will be realized. There is no hospital 
in England, with ten times the number of beds, 
that has ever admitted to its wards anything like 
this number of serious surgical cases. We were 
essentially a clearing hospital, with this important 
proviso, that we could, when it was required, carry 
out at once the heaviest operative work, and retain 
special cases as long as we thought fit. Our object 
was always to get each patient into such a condi- 
tion that he could be transferred back to the base 
without injury to his chances of recovery, and 

156 



WORK AT FURNES 157 

without undue pain, and I believe we saved the 
life of many a patient by giving him a night's rest 
in the Straw Ward, and sending him on next day 
with his wound properly dressed and supported. 
The cases themselves were of a far more severe 
type than those we had at Antwerp. There, 
indeed, I was astonished at the small amount of 
injury that had in many cases resulted from both 
shrapnel and bullet wounds, and it was certainly 
worthy of note that we had never once in our 
work there had to perform an amputation. At 
Furnes, we drew our patients from the line be- 
tween Nieuport and Dixmude, where the fighting 
was for the most part at close range and of a most 
murderous nature. There were no forts, and the 
soldiers had little or no protection from the hail 
of high-explosive shells which the enemy poured 
upon them. In Nieuport and Dixmude them- 
selves the fighting was frequently from house to 
house, the most deadly form of fighting known. 
The wounds we had to treat were correspondingly 
severe — limbs sometimes almost completely torn 
off, terrible wounds of the skull, and bullet wounds 
where large masses of the tissues had been com- 
pletely torn away. It was difficult to see how 
human beings could survive such awful injuries, 
and, indeed, our death-roll was a long one. Added 
to this, the men had been working in the wet and 



158 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

the mud for weeks past. Their clothes were stiff 
with it, and such a thing as a clean wound was 
not to be thought of. Simple cases at Antwerp 
were here tedious and dangerous, and they re- 
quired all the resources of nursing and of surgery 
that we could bring to bear upon them. Still, it 
was extraordinary what good results followed on 
common-sense lines of treatment, and we soon 
learnt to give up no case as hopeless. But each 
involved a great amount of work, first in operat- 
ing and trying to reduce chaos to reason, and then 
in dressing and nursing. For everyone all round 
— surgeons, dressers, and nurses — it was real hard 
physical labour. 

Our rapid turnover of patients involved a large 
amount of manual labour in stretcher work, clear- 
ing up wards, and so on, but all this was done for 
us by our brancardiers, or stretcher-bearers. These 
were Belgians who for one reason or another could 
not serve with the army, and who were therefore 
utilized by the Government for purposes such as 
these. We had some eight of them attached to 
our hospital, and they were of the greatest use to 
us, acting as hospital orderlies. They were mostly 
educated men — schoolmasters and University 
teachers — but they were quite ready to do any 
work we might require at any hour of the day or 
night. They carried the patients to the theatre 



WORK AT FURNES 159 

and to the wards, they cleaned the stretchers — a 
very difficult and unpleasant job — they tidied up 
the wards and scrubbed the floors, and they carried 
away all the soiled dressings and burned them. 
They were a fine set of men, and I do not know 
what we should have done without them. 

Work began at an early hour, for every case in 
the hospital required dressing, and, as we never 
knew what we should have to deal with at night, 
we always tried to get through the routine before 
lunch. At ten o'clock Colonel Maestrio arrived, 
with two of his medical officers, and made a com- 
plete round of the hospital with the surgeons in 
charge of the various cases. They took the 
greatest interest in the patients, and in our 
attempts to cure them. They would constantly 
spend an hour with me in the operating theatre, 
and after any exceptional operation they would 
follow the progress of the patient with the keenest 
interest. Many of the cases with which we had 
to deal required a certain amount of ingenuity in 
the reconstruction of what had been destroyed, so 
that surgery had often to be on rather original 
lines. What interested them most was the fixa- 
tion of fractures by means of steel plates, which 
we adopted in all our serious cases. Apparently 
the method is very little used abroad, and as an 
operation it is distinctly spectacular, for in a few 



160 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

minutes a shapeless mass which the patient can- 
not bear to be touched is transformed into a limb 
almost as strong as the other, which can be moved 
about in any direction without fear of breaking, 
and, when the patient recovers consciousness, 
almost without discomfort. We almost always 
had an interested audience, professional, clerical, 
or lay, for the chauffeurs found much amusement 
in these feats of engineering. 

In the afternoon we almost always had some 
distinguished visitor to entertain, and it is one of 
my chief regrets that we never kept a visitors' 
book. Its pages would one day have been of the 
greatest interest. Twice every week the Queen 
of the Belgians came round our wards. She came 
quite simply, with one of her ladies and one of the 
Belgian medical officers, and no one could possibly 
have taken a deeper interest in the patients. Her 
father studied medicine as a hobby, and had, 
indeed, become a very distinguished physician, 
and she herself has had considerable training in 
medicine, so that her interest was a great deal 
more than that of an ordinary lay visitor. She 
was quite able to criticize and to appreciate 
details of nursing and of treatment. She always 
spoke to every patient, and she had a kind word 
for every one of them, Belgian, French, or even 
German, for we had a few Germans. There was 



WORK AT FURNES 161 

something deeply touching in the scene. The 
dimly lit ward, with its crude furniture, the slim 
figure in black, bending in compassion over the 
rough fellows who would gladly have given their 
lives for her, and who now lay wounded in the 
cause in which she herself had suffered. The 
Germans may destroy Belgium, but they will 
never destroy the kingdom of its Queen. Some- 
times the King came to see his soldiers — a tall, 
silent man, with the face of one who has suffered 
much, and as simple, as gentle, and as kindly as 
his Queen. It was good to see the faces light up 
as he entered a ward, to see heads painfully raised 
to gaze after no splendid uniform, but a man. 

One of our most distinguished and most wel- 
come visitors was Madame Curie, the discoverer of 
radium. She brought her large X-ray equipment 
to Furnes for work amongst the wounded, and we 
persuaded her to stay with us for a week. One of 
our storerooms was rapidly fitted up as an im- 
promptu radiographic department, the windows 
painted over and covered with thick paper, a stove 
introduced, and a dark-room contrived with the 
aid of a cupboard and two curtains. Electric 
current was obtained from a dynamo bolted on 
to the step of a twenty-horse-power car, and 
driven by a belt from the flywheel of the engine. 
The car stood out in the courtyard and snorted 

U 



162 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

away, whilst we worked in the storeroom along- 
side. The coil and mercury break were combined 
in one piece, and the whole apparatus was skil- 
fully contrived with a view to portability. Madame 
Curie was an indefatigable worker, and in a very 
short time had taken radiographs of all the cases 
which we could place at her disposal, and, indeed, 
we ransacked all the hospitals in Fumes, for when 
they heard of her arrival, they were only too glad 
to make use of the opportunity. Mademoiselle 
Curie developed the plates, and between them 
they produced photographs of the greatest utility 
to us. Considering its obvious utility, whether in 
war or in civil practice, it has always been a source 
of wonder to me that there is no such thing as a 
car designed and built with a view to radiography. 
Perhaps it exists, but if so, I have never met it. 
It only means the building into the frame of a 
suitable dynamo, and the provision of means for 
storing the rest of the equipment. It would place 
an X-ray equipment at the disposal of every 
cottage hospital, or even of a country-house, and 
it would place the cottage hospital, not to men- 
tion the country-house, at the disposal of the 
enterprising radiographer. 

As soon as our patients could be moved, we 
had to send them on to their base hospitals — the 
Belgians to Calais and the French to Dunkirk. 



1 .•'.•• 




o 



WORK AT FURNES 163 

From Calais the Belgians were brought over the 
Channel, and distributed all over England and 
Scotland. I had a postcard from one of them 
from Perth. The French were taken on in hos- 
pital ships to Cherbourg and other seaports along 
the coast. From Furnes they were all carried in 
hospital trains, and the scene at the station when 
a large batch of wounded was going off was most 
interesting. Only the worst cases were ever 
brought to our hospital ; all the others were taken 
straight to the station, and waited there until a 
train was ready to take them on. Often they 
would be there for twelve hours, or even twenty- 
four, before they could be got on, and the train 
itself would be constantly shunted to let troops 
and ammunition go by, and might take twelve 
hours to reach its destination. There were no 
proper arrangements for the feeding of these men, 
all of whom were more or less badly wounded; 
and at first, when we heard at the hospital that a 
train was about to be made up, we took down all 
the soup and coffee we could manage to spare in 
big pails and jugs. But this was a mere make- 
shift, and was superseded very soon by a more 
up-to-date arrangement. A proper soup-kitchen 
was established at the station, with huge boilers 
full of soup and coffee always ready, and after 
that it was never necessary for a wounded soldier 



164 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

to leave Furnes hungry. All this was due to the 
energy and resource of Miss Macnaughtan, the 
authoress, who took it up as her special charge. 
She had a little passage screened off, and in this 
were fitted up boilers for coffee and soup, tables 
for cutting up meat and vegetables, and even 
a machine for cutting up the bread. It was all 
most beautifully arranged, and here she worked 
all day long, preparing for the inevitable crowd 
of wounded which the night would bring. How 
it was all managed was a mystery to me, for there 
was not enough food in Eurnes to feed a tame cat, 
let alone a trainload of famished soldiers, and I 
am looking anxiously for her next book in the 
hopes of finding the solution. 

The trains themselves were well equipped, 
though nothing to the hospital trains of England. 
The more severe cases were carried in long cars on 
a double row of stretchers, and they looked very 
comfortable on a cold night, with their oil-lamps 
and a coke stove in the centre of each car. A 
stretcher is, perhaps, not exactly a bed of roses 
for a wounded man, but when one considers what 
pain is involved in moving a man who is badly 
wounded, there is obviously a great advantage in 
placing him on a stretcher once for all on the 
battle-field, and never moving him again until he 
can be actually placed in bed in a hospital. On 



WORK AT FURNES 165 

the train the men were looked after by the priests, 
splendid fellows who never seemed tired of doing 
all they could for the soldiers. One found the 
Belgian priest everywhere — in the trenches, in the 
hospitals, and in the trains — unobtrusive, always 
cheerful, always ready to help. From the brave 
Archbishop Mercier to the humblest village cure, 
regardless of their comfort and careless of their 
lives, they have stood by their people in the hour 
of their trial. May their honour be great in the 
hour of Belgium's triumph ! 



XIX 

FUKNES— THE TOWN 

Like so many of the cities of Belgium, Furnes is 
a town of the past. To stand in the great square, 
surrounded by buildings which would delight the 
heart of any artist, is to travel back through three 
centuries of time. Spain and the Renaissance 
surround us, and we look instinctively towards 
the Pavilion for the soldiers of Philip, or glance 
with apprehension at the door of the Palais de 
Justice for the sinister form of Peter Titelmann 
the Inquisitor. Around this very square marched 
the procession of the Holy Office, in all the insolent 
blasphemy of its power, and on these very stones 
were kindled the flames that were to destroy its 
victims. But all these have gone; the priest and 
his victim, the swaggering bravo and the King 
he served, have gone to their account, and Furnes 
is left, the record of a time when men built 
temples like angels and worshipped in them like 
devils. 

The immense square, with the beautiful public 
buildings which surround it, speaks of a time 

166 



FURNES— THE TOWN 167 

when Furnes was an important town. As early 
as the year 850 it is said that Baldwin of the Iron 
Arm, the first of the great Counts of Flanders, 
had established a fortress here to withstand the 
invasion of the Normans. After that Furnes ap- 
pears repeatedly with varying fortunes in the 
turbulent history of the Middle Ages, until in the 
thirteenth century it was razed to the ground by 
Robert of Artois. In the next three hundred 
years, however, it must have entirely recovered 
its position, for in the days of the Spanish Fury 
it was one of the headquarters of the Inquisition 
and of the Spanish Army, and there is no town in 
Belgium upon which the Spanish occupation has 
left a greater mark. Since then, of no commercial 
or political importance, it has lived the life of a dull 
country town, and tradition says that there is 
plenty of solid wealth stored by its thrifty inhabi- 
tants behind the plain house-fronts which line its 
quiet streets. 

From the centre of the square one can see all 
that there is to be seen of Furnes. The four sides 
are lined by beautiful old houses whose decorated 
fronts and elaborate gables tell of the Renaissance 
and of Spanish days. Behind the low red roofs 
tower the churches of St. Walburga and St. 
Nicholas, dwarfing the houses which nestle at their 
base. In the corners of the square are public 



168 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

buildings, small when compared with those of 
Bruges and Ypres, but unsurpassed in exquisite 
detail of design. Behind one corner rises the tall 
belfry without which no Flemish town would be 
complete. On an autumn evening when the sun 
is setting, when the red roofs glow with a deeper 
crimson, and the tall churches catch the sun's 
last rays on their old brick walls, there can be 
few more perfect pictures than the square of 
Furnes. 

The two oldest buildings in the square stand at 
the ends of the eastern side. At the north end 
is the Pavilion des Officiers espagnols, once the 
Town Hall, and, in the days of the Spanish occu- 
pation, the headquarters of the army for the 
district. It is an old Flemish building, solidly 
built, with high-pitched roof, and windows framed 
in ornamental stonework, ending in a big square 
tower with battlements and little turrets at its 
corners. A short outside staircase leads up to 
the entrance. The whole building gives the im- 
pression that in the days when it was built the 
Town Hall was also the Fortress, and that the 
mayor had duties more strenuous than the eating 
of dinners. At the other end of the eastern side 
stands the old Halle aux Vins, where the night- 
watchmen had their quarters, a fine old gabled 
house with a loggia reached by a flight of steps 



FURNES— THE TOWN 169 

in the centre, a row of plain stone columns sup- 
porting the floors above. 

Directly opposite is the north-west corner of 
the square, with the Palais de Justice on the right 
and the Hotel de Ville on the left. Both date 
from the Spanish occupation, but they are very 
different in their style of architecture. The first 
is classical and severe, the second has all the 
warmth of the Renaissance. The Hotel de Ville 
is an elaborately decorated building, with two 
exquisite gables and a steep roof surmounted by 
a little octagonal tower. The loggia below, stand- 
ing out from the building and supporting a balcony 
above, is perhaps its most charming feature, both 
for the beauty of its proportions and the delicacy 
of its carved stone balustrades. Inside, the rooms 
are as they were three hundred years ago, and the 
wonderful hangings of Cordova leather in the 
council chamber are still intact. Beside the Hotel 
de Ville the straight lines of the Palais de Justice, 
with its pillars and its high narrow windows, form 
a striking contrast. It was here, in the large room 
on the first floor, that the Inquisition held its 
awful court, and here were the instruments of 
torture with which it sought to enforce its will. 
Behind the Palais rises the tall belfry, a big square 
tower from which springs an octagonal turret 
carrying an elaborate campanile. There is a 



170 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

quaint survival on this belfry, for upon it the 
town crier has a little hut. He is a cobbler, and 
from below one can hear the tap-tap of his hammer 
as he plies his trade. But at night he calls out 
the hours to the town below, together with any 
information of interest, concluding with the 
assurance that he and his wife are in good health. 
The office has descended from father to son from 
the earliest days of the history of Furnes, and its 
holder has always been a cobbler. Till early in 
last November the record was unbroken, but, 
alas ! the fear of German shells was too much for 
the cobbler, and he is gone. 

Furnes is a town of contrasts, and though both 
its churches were built by the wonderful architects 
of the fourteenth century, there could hardly be 
two buildings more diverse. Behind the line of 
red roofs on the east of the square rises the rugged 
tower of St. Nicholas, a great square mass of old 
and weather-beaten brick, unfinished like so many 
of the Belgian towers, but rough, massive, and 
grand, like some rude giant. On the north, 
behind the Palais de Justice and the belfry, 
stands St. Walburga, with the delicate tracery of 
her flying buttresses and her spire fine as a needle. 
There is something fitting in the rugged simplicity 
which commemorates the grand old Bishop, and 
in the exquisite fragility of the shrine of the 



FURNES— THE TOWN 171 

virgin saint. The double flying buttresses of 
St. Walburga, intersecting in mid-air, and ap- 
parently defying the laws of gravity, are as delicate 
a dream as the mind of architect could conceive, 
and they give to the whole an airy grace which 
cannot be described. The church was planned six 
hundred years ago on a gigantic scale, in the days 
when men built for the worship of God and not 
for the accommodation of an audience, and for 
six hundred years the choir stood alone as a 
challenge to future generations to complete what 
had been so gloriously begun. Only seven years 
ago the transept was added, and to the credit of 
its builders it is worthy to stand beside the choir. 
One wonders how many hundred years may have 
passed before the vision of the first great architect 
is complete. It is built for the most part of red 
brick, the rich red brick of Belgium, which grows 
only more mellow with age. Inside, the tall 
pillars of a dark grey stone support at a great 
height a finely groined roof of the same red brick, 
lit by a clerestory so open that one wonders how 
it can carry the weight of the roof above. The 
tall windows of the transept, reaching almost 
from the floor to the roof, with their delicate 
tracery, carry on the same effect of airiness, while 
their light is softened by the really beautiful 
stained glass which they frame. The richlj* 



172 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

carved choir-stalls of dark mahogany and the fine 
organ furnish an interior of which any town in 
England might well be proud. And all this 
magnificence is in a little Flemish town of some 
six thousand inhabitants. 

One is brought suddenly face to face with the 
tremendous difference which exists between the 
Protestant and the Catholic conception of what a 
church is and what it is for. To the one it is a 
place where men meet for mutual support and 
instruction, for united worship; to the other it is 
a place where men meet God. To the one some 
organized service is necessary; the other only 
requires the stones on which to kneel. The one 
will only go to church — in fact, he will only find 
his church open at certain appointed times; for 
the other it is only closed with darkness. Of 
course, I am using the words Protestant and 
Catholic to indicate broad conceptions of religion, 
and not as defining definite bodies of men; but 
even of those who call themselves by these names 
what I have said is largely true. And this differ- 
ence in conception is reflected in the churches 
which they build. For the one a simple building 
will suffice which will seat in comfort those who 
may come; the other, though he alone should 
ever enter it, will raise to heaven the mightiest 
temple which mortal hands can frame. 



FURNES— THE TOWN 173 

Fumes still carries on a tradition of medieval 
times — the strange procession which passes 
through its streets and across the great square 
on the last Sunday in July. Its origin, in the 
twelfth century, is unknown, though many legends 
are woven around it. It is a long procession, in 
which are represented many of the episodes in 
the story of the Christ, some in sculptured groups 
of figures, some by living actors. Before each 
group walks a penitent, barefoot and heavily 
veiled in black gown and hood, carrying an in- 
scription to explain the group which follows. 
Abraham appears with Isaac, Moses with the 
serpent, Joseph and Mary, the Magi, and the 
flight into Egypt. Then come incidents from 
the life of Jesus, and the great tragedy of its close. 
The Host and its attendant priests conclude the 
procession. It is all very primitive and bizarre, 
but behind it there is a note of reality by which 
one cannot but be moved. For the figures con- 
cealed beneath the black hoods and dragging 
along the heavy wooden crosses are not actors; 
they are men and women who have come, many of 
them, long distances to Furnes, in the hope that 
by this penance they may obtain the forgiveness 
they desire. 



XX 
A JOURNEY 

The hospital had already been established in 
Furnes for ten days, and even in that time we had 
once had to escape to Poperinghe before the German 
advance, when, after a short visit to England, I 
left London to rejoin my friends on the last 
Friday in October. Crossing to the Continent is 
not at any time pleasant, and the addition of 
submarines and mines scarcely adds to its charms. 
But Government had certainly done their best 
to make it attractive, for when we arrived at 
Dover on Friday night we found a comfortable 
boat waiting to take us over in the morn- 
ing. We spent the night soundly asleep in her 
cabins, without the anxiety of feeling that we 
might miss her if we did not get up in time, and 
after an excellent breakfast we felt ready for 
anything. We were late in starting, for the 
Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Corps was going over, 
and their ambulances had to be got on board. 
We watched them being neatly picked up in the 
slings and planted side by side on deck. At half- 
past eight they were all on board, and we started off. 

174 



A JOURNEY 175 

There was a moderate sea running, but our three 
screws made light work of it, and in an hour we 
were half-way over to our destination, Dunkirk. 
We were sitting in our cabin talking when sud- 
denly the engines stopped, and there was con- 
siderable commotion on deck. We looked out to 
see what was the matter, and there met our eyes 
a sight which we are likely to remember— a huge 
man-of-war sinking. She was down by the stern, 
so far that every now and then the waves broke 
over her, and it was evident that she would soon 
go under. A submarine had attacked her an 
hour before, and struck her with two torpedoes. 
The first destroyed her screws, and she was then 
an easy prey ; the second entered her saloon in the 
stern. She was the Hermes, an old vessel, and of 
no great value at the present day, but it was 
tragic to see a great cruiser expiring, stabbed in 
the dark. Thanks to her buoyancy, she was only 
sinking slowly, and there was ample time for the 
whole of her crew to escape. Very different would 
be the fate of an unarmed vessel, for the explosion 
of a torpedo would probably blow such a large 
hole in the thin steel plates that she would go to 
the bottom like a stone. To torpedo a merchant- 
man simply means the cold-blooded murder of the 
crew, for their chances of escape would be almost 
negligible, whilst it is impossible to find words to 



176 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

describe the attempts which have been made to 
sink hospital ships. About the last there is a 
degree of callous inhumanity remarkable even for 
Germany, for how could doctors and nurses make 
any efforts to save their own lives when it would 
be impossible for them to do anything to all at 
save the lives of their patients ? And yet these 
things are not the unconsidered acts of a moment ; 
they are all part of the campaign of f rightfulness 
which has been so carefully planned for years, the 
consummation of the doctrines which learned pro- 
fessors have proclaimed for so long and with such 
astonishing success. 

The order was given for our boats to be lowered, 
and down they went all six of them, manned 
partly by the crew and partly by the Ambulance 
Corps. We were surrounded by torpedo-boats, 
British and French, and most of the crew of the 
Hermes had already been transferred to them. 
A few minutes later there was a cheer, and we saw 
the Captain step down into one of the boats, the 
last man to leave his ship. Our boats had picked 
up twenty or so of the men, and the problem now 
was to get them on board again. A moderate sea 
was running, but it required all the skill of our 
sailors to haul them up without mishap. Standing 
by as we were, the ship rolled considerably, and 
several times one of the boats was within an ace 



A JOURNEY 177 

of being broken up against her side. To get a 
boat out from a big liner in a heavy sea must be 
an almost miraculous feat, whilst to get her back 
again must be a sheer impossibility. As it was, 
it took us at least an hour to get those six boats 
on board. All this time four torpedo-boats were 
racing in circles round and round us, on the look- 
out for the submarine, and ready to cut it down 
if it should appear. Indeed, a report went round 
that a torpedo was actually fired at us, but passed 
underneath the ship on account of her shallow 
draught. Standing at rest, we would have been 
an easy target, and but for our friends the torpedo- 
boats we should very likely have been attacked. 
It is not a good plan to hang about in the Channel 
just now. 

Meanwhile the Hermes was steadily sinking. 
By the time all her crew were off her stern was 
awash, and in another half -hour she had a very 
marked list to port. She slowly, almost imper- 
ceptibly, listed more and more, and then the end 
came with startling suddenness. With a slow and 
gentle roll she heeled over till she was completely 
on her side and her great funnels under water ; she 
remained there for a moment, and then slowly 
turned turtle and gradually sank stern first. For 
a long time about twenty feet of her nose remained 
above water, then this slowly sank and disap- 

12 



178 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

peared. It was all so quiet that it seemed like 
some queer dream. The fires must have been 
drawn with great promptness, for there was no 
explosion as her funnels went under, though 
we were standing some way off to be clear 
of flying fragments. She had been stabbed 
in the dark, and she passed away without a 
murmur. 

There is something very moving in the end of 
a great vessel. It is so hard to believe that a 
thing of such vast bulk, and with organs of such 
terrific power, should be so utterly helpless because 
of a mere hole in her side. It is like watching 
the death of a god. We make such a turmoil 
about the end of our puny lives, and that great 
giant slides away into darkness without a murmur. 
Ah, but you will say, a man is of far more value 
than a ship. Is he ? Is any single man in this 
world worth as much as the Titanic ? And if so, 
how ? He can make wealth, but so could she. 
He could bring happiness to others, and so could 
she. I have yet to find any ground on which 
any man can be put up in competition with that 
vessel in sheer worth to the world, and I am not 
speaking in any low sense of values. For I sup- 
pose the greatest man who ever lived might feel 
that his life was well spent if he had brought two 
continents nearer together. It was for that that 



A JOURNEY 179 

she was created. The hard fact is that there are 
very few indeed of us, in spite of all the noise we 
make, who are worth to the world a thousand 
pounds, and if she could sell the bulk of us 
for that she would be positively drunk with 
fortune. 

But, you will say, a ship has no soul. Are you 
quite so sure about that ? Most people will main- 
tain that their bodies contain a soul, and then 
they proceed to build up these same bodies with 
bread and bacon, and even beer, and in the end 
they possess bodies constructed without any 
shadow of doubt out of these ingredients. And 
if ten thousand men have toiled night and day, 
in blazing furnace and in dark mine, to build a 
mighty vessel, at the cost of years of labour, at 
the cost of pain and death, is not that vessel a 
part of them as much as their poor bodies, and 
do not their souls live in it as much as in their 
flesh and blood ? We speak of the resurrection 
of the Body, and superior people smile at an idea 
so out-of-date and unscientific. To me the body 
is not mere flesh and blood, it is the whole complex 
of all that a man has thought and lived and done, 
and when it arises there will arise with it all that 
he has toiled for on earth, all that he has gained, 
and all that he has created by the sweat of his 
brow and the hunger of his soul. The world is 



180 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

not the dust-heap of the centuries, but only their 
storehouse. 

It was late when we reached Furnes after a 
freezing drive in the dark, but all our thoughts 
were overshadowed by the tragedy we had seen. 
We felt that we had been present at the burial of 
a god. 



XXI 

THE AMBULANCE CORPS 

One of the most difficult problems for a medical 
service in war is the recovery of the wounded 
from the field of battle and their carriage back 
to hospital. In the old days men fought out a 
battle in a few hours, and the field at the end of 
the day was left to the conqueror. Then the 
doctors could go forward and attend to the 
wounded on the spot without any special danger 
to themselves. A man might lie out all night, 
but he would be certain to be picked up next 
day. But in this war everything is changed. It 
is one continuous siege, with the result that the 
removal of the wounded is a matter of extra- 
ordinary difficulty and danger. I have met with 
one officer who has been in a trench out at the 
extreme front for two and a half months. During 
the whole of that time he has never seen a German, 
and the nearest German trench is just one hundred 
yards away ! Shell and shot have been pouring 
over his head all that time, and to raise one's head 

above the ground would be to court instant death. 

181 



182 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Between the trenches the ground is a quagmire, 
and any advance by either side is out of the ques- 
tion. But a time will come when the ground is 
just solid enough for a man to stand, there will be 
a desperate struggle for a few yards of ground, 
again both sides will subside into new trenches; 
but now between those trenches will lie perhaps 
some hundreds of wounded, and how in the world 
are they to be got ? This is the problem with 
which an ambulance is everywhere faced — the 
recovery of the wounded from disputed ground. 
It was to grapple with difficulties like these that 
the rules of the Geneva Convention were framed, 
so that men wearing a Red Cross on their arms 
might be able to go where no combatant of either 
side dare venture, and succour the wounded, 
whether they were friend or foe, in safety both 
for themselves and for the wounded. It is, after 
all, possible to fight as gentlemen. 

Or at least it was until a few months ago. 
Since then we have had a demonstration of 
" scientific " war such as has never before been 
given to mankind. Now, to wear a Red Cross is 
simply to offer a better mark for the enemy's fire, 
and we only wore them in order that our own 
troops might know our business and make use of 
our aid. A hospital is a favourite mark for the 
German artillery, whilst the practice of painting 



THE AMBULANCE CORPS 183 

Red Crosses on the tops of ambulance cars is by 
many people considered unwise, as it invites any 
passing aeroplane to drop a bomb. But the 
Germans have carried their systematic contempt 
of the rules of war so far that it is now almost im- 
possible for our own men to recognize their Red 
Crosses. Time after time their Red Cross cars 
have been used to conceal machine-guns, their 
flags have floated over batteries, and they have 
actually used stretchers to bring up ammunition 
to the trenches. Whilst I was at Furnes two 
German spies were working with an ambulance, 
in khaki uniforms, bringing in the wounded. They 
were at it for nearly a week before they were dis- 
covered, and then, by a ruse, they succeeded in 
driving straight through the Belgian lines and back 
to their own, Red Cross ambulance, khaki and all. 
The problems, then, that have to be faced by an 
ambulance corps in the present war are fairly per- 
plexing, and they demand a degree of resource 
and cool courage beyond the ordinary. That these 
qualities are possessed by the members of the am- 
bulance corps of which Dr. Hector Munro and 
Lady Dorothie Feilding are the leading members 
is merely a matter of history. They have been in 
as many tight corners in the last few months as 
many an old and seasoned veteran, and they have 
invariably come out triumphant. They started in 



184 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

Ghent under the Belgian Red Cross with a party 
of four surgeons, five women, and three men for 
the stretchers, and two chauffeurs to drive the 
two ambulances. Now they have grown into an 
organization which takes on a great part of the 
ambulance work of the Belgian Army. At Ghent 
they were attached to the big Red Cross hospital 
in the Flandria Palace Hotel, and at first it was 
dull, for most of the fighting was around Antwerp, 
and the wounded were taken there. We were in 
Antwerp just then, and it was by no means dull. 
We shared Alost and Termonde as a common 
hunting-ground, and we several times had a visit 
from Dr. Munro in the Boulevard Leopold. In 
fact, we were discussing the possibility of arrang- 
ing to work together when the crash came and 
Antwerp fell. 

For the next few days the ambulance corps had 
enough work and ran enough risks to satisfy even 
the members of that notorious organization. The 
Germans were coming on with great rapidity, and 
if there is one dangerous job, it is to pick up the 
wounded of a retreating army. But here the 
interest for an English ambulance was doubled, 
for the British Army was covering the retreat of 
the Belgians and the French. On Sunday, the 
1 1th of October, they were asked to go out to Melle, 
four miles south-east of Ghent, to help with some 



THE AMBULANCE CORPS 185 

French wounded, and, after spending some time 
there, they met the British Staff, and were asked 
to help them in their retreat through Zwynarde, 
a town on the Scheldt about four miles south of 
Ghent and the same distance from Melle. It was 
a dangerous undertaking, as the intention was to 
blow up the bridge which crosses the Scheldt at 
Zwynarde and to fight a retreating battle covering 
the retirement of our allies. The bridge was to be 
blown up at ten o'clock that evening, and though 
it was only four miles away, it was already dark 
and a mist was rising from the river. The main 
roads were in the hands of the Germans, and there 
was nothing for it but to get across by a small 
side-road. They started off in the mist, and 
promptly lost their way. It is a pleasing situation 
to be lost in the dark somewhere very close to the 
enemy's lines when you know that the only avail- 
able bridge is just going to be blown up. A thick 
mist had risen all around, and they were midway 
between two batteries — British and German — 
engaged in an artillery duel. The crash of the 
guns and the scream of the shells overhead filled 
the darkness with terror. But there was nothing 
for it but to go straight on, and though they must 
have gone right through the German lines and 
out again, they reached the bridge just ten minutes 
before it was blown into the air. 



186 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

We all met at Ostend, and decided to join forces 
at Furnes, and it worked out as a splendid ar- 
rangement for both parties. Though our organiza- 
tions remained entirely distinct, we worked to- 
gether, and they had the advantage of a hospital 
to which they could always bring their patients, 
whilst we had the services of the smartest ambu- 
lance corps on the Continent. The qualities re- 
quired for the satisfactory working of a hospital 
and the successful running of an ambulance are so 
distinct that I am sure that the ideal arrangement 
is to have two entirely distinct organizations 
working in harmony. 

The position of an ambulance up at the front is 
always a delicate one, for as it moves about from 
place to place its members have opportunities of 
picking up information about the position and 
movements of the troops of a very confidential 
nature. It was therefore a great advantage to 
Dr. Munro when his party was joined by M. de 
Broqueville, the son of the Minister for War; for 
it meant that they would have full information 
as to where wounded were likely to require their 
help, and that they possessed the full confidence 
of the Belgian authorities. Their position and 
our own had been very greatly affected by the 
fortunes of the war, for the Belgian Croix Rouge 
and Army Medical Services were for the moment in 



THE AMBULANCE CORPS 187 

abeyance, and instead of obtaining from them the 
help which had hitherto been so generously given, 
we had now to undertake their work and to rely 
entirely on our own resources. We had not to wait 
long for an opportunity to show what we could do. 
The Belgian Army, supported by a certain num- 
ber of French troops, made its final stand on the 
line of the Yser, the little river which runs from 
Ypres through Dixmude and Nieuport to the 
sea. From this position they have never since 
been shaken, but they have never had to with- 
stand more desperate attacks than those which 
took place in the end of October. The centre of 
these was Dixmude, and here the Germans threw 
against the little remnant of the Belgian Army 
forces which might have been expected to shatter 
it at a blow. Their efforts culminated in one of 
the fiercest and bloodiest engagements of the whole 
war, and at the height of the engagement word 
came that there were wounded in Dixmude, and 
that ambulances were urgently required to get 
them out. Getting wounded out of a town which 
is being shelled is not exactly a joke, and when the 
town is in rapid process of annihilation it almost 
becomes serious. But this was what the Corps 
had come out for, and two ambulances and an 
open car started off at once. As far as Oudecap- 
pelle the road was crowded with motor transport 



188 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

waggons carrying supplies of food and ammunition 
to the troops, but beyond that it was empty, unless 
one counts the shells which were falling on it in a 
steady hail. Every now and then a Jack Johnson 
would fall and leave a hole in which one could bury 
a motor, and, apart from the shells, the holes made 
driving risky. There was over a mile of the road 
in this unhealthy state, and entirely exposed to 
the enemy's guns, before any shelter could be ob- 
tained; but the wounded must be fetched, and 
the cars pushed on as fast as they dared to drive. 
They were suddenly pulled up by an appalling 
obstacle. A Belgian battery advancing along the 
road to the front only twenty minutes before had 
been struck by a big shell. Several of the gunners 
were horribly mangled; ten horses lay dead, most 
of them in fragments; the gun was wrecked, and 
all its equipment scattered about the road. It was 
some minutes before the remaining soldiers could 
clear the road sufficiently for the cars to pass. 

Dixmude itself was a roaring furnace, and shells 
were pouring into it in all directions. Prac- 
tically every house had been damaged, many were 
totally demolished, and many more were on fire. 
The wounded were in the Town Hall on the 
square, and shells were bursting all over it. The 
upper portion was completely destroyed, and the 
church close by was blazing furiously, and must 



THE AMBULANCE CORPS 189 

have set fire to the Town Hall soon after. On the 
steps lay a dead Marine, and beside him stood a 
French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The 
wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got 
out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned 
alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, 
loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome 
confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were 
lying together. The wounded had all to be 
carried on stretchers, for everyone who could 
crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only 
those who have shifted wounded on stretchers can 
appreciate the courage it requires to do it under 
shell fire. At last they were all packed into the 
ambulances, and even as they left the building 
with the last, a shell struck it overhead and de- 
molished one of the walls. How they ever got 
out of Dixmude alive is beyond the ken of a mere 
mortal, but I suppose it was only another mani- 
festation of the Star which shines so brightly over 
the fortunes of the Munro Ambulance. 

How high is the appreciation of the Belgian 
Government for their work is shown in the fact 
that three of the lady members of the Corps have 
just been decorated with the Order of Leopold — 
one of the highest honours which Belgium has to 
confer. It is not every honour which is so well 
earned. 



XXII 

PERVYSE— THE TRENCHES 

This is indeed the strangest of all wars, for it is 
fought in the dark. Eyes are used, but they are 
the eyes of an aeroplane overhead, or of a spy in 
the enemy's lines. The man who fights lives 
underground, or under water, and rarely sees his 
foe. There is something strangely terrible, some- 
thing peculiarly inhuman, in the silent stealth 
of this war of the blind. The General sits in a 
quiet room far behind the lines, planning a battle 
he will never see. The gunner aims by level and 
compass with faultless precision, and hurls his 
awful engines of destruction to destroy ten miles 
away a house which is to him only a dot on a map. 
And the soldier sitting in his trench hears the 
shells whistling overhead and waits, knowing 
well that if he appeared for one instant above 
that rampart of earth he would be pierced by 
a dozen bullets from rifles which are out of his 
sight. 

It is a war in the dark, and by far the most 

190 



PERVYSE— THE TRENCHES 191 

important of its operations are carried on, its 
battles are fought, in the literal sense of the word, 
underground. Perhaps the next war will be 
fought not merely underground, but deep in the 
bowels of the earth, and victory will rest, not with 
the finest shots or the expert swordsmen, but with 
the men who can dig a tunnel most quickly. The 
trenches may be cut by some herculean plough, 
deep tunnels may be dug by great machines, and 
huge pumping engines may keep them dry. Our 
engineers have conquered the air, the water, and 
the land, but it is still with picks and spades that 
our soldiers dig themselves into safety. 

At Furnes the nearest point to us of the fighting 
line was Pervyse, and as the Ambulance Corps had 
a dressing-station there, we often went out to see 
them and the soldiers in the trenches close by. 
But the Belgian line was most effectively protected 
by an agency far more powerful than any trench, 
for over miles and miles of land spread the floods 
with which the Belgians, by breaking down the 
dykes, had themselves flooded the country. The 
floods were a protection, but they were also a 
difficulty, since they made actual trenches an 
impossibility. No ordinary pumps could have 
kept them dry. So they had built huts of earth 
behind a thick earth bank, and partly sunk in 
the very low embankment, only two or three feet 



192 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

above the fields, on which the railway ran. They 
were roofed with boards covered again with earth 
and sods, and behind each was a little door by 
which one could crawl in. Inside, the floor was 
covered with a bed of straw, and a bucket with 
holes in its sides and full of red-hot coke did 
duty as a stove, while narrow loopholes served for 
ventilation and for light, and were to be used for 
firing from in the event of an attack. Of course 
the huts were very cramped, but they were at 
least warm, they gave protection from the weather, 
and above all they were safe. The men only 
occupied them as a matter of fact for short periods 
of one or two days at a time, a fresh guard coming 
out from Furnes to take their places. 

These huts, and all covered trenches, are only 
safe from shrapnel exploding in the air or near 
by. No ordinary trench is safe from a shell 
falling upon it; but this, as a matter of fact, has 
scarcely ever happened. For shells are as a rule 
fired from some considerable distance, and in most 
cases the opposing lines of trenches are so close 
together that there would be great danger of 
sending a shell into the back of your own trench, 
the most deadly disaster that can happen. The 
trenches are often so close together that their 
occupants can talk to one another, and a con- 
siderable amount of camaraderie may spring up. 



PERVYSE— THE TRENCHES 193 

I know of one instance where a private arrange- 
ment was made that they would not shoot on 
either side. One day a man on our side was 
wounded, and there was great annoyance till a 
note was thrown across apologizing profusely, 
and explaining that it was done by a man in a 
trench behind who did not know of the compact ! 
A few days later a message came to say that an 
important officer was coming to inspect the 
German trench, and that they would be obliged 
to fire, but that they would give due warning by 
three shots fired in quick succession. The shots 
were fired, and our men lay low, under a storm 
of bullets, till firing ceased, and another message 
arrived to say that the danger was past. We 
really are queer animals ! 

Behind the trenches at Pervyse the fields were 
positively riddled with shot-holes. In one space, 
not more than twenty yards square, we counted 
the marks of over a hundred shells. The railway 
station was like a sieve, and most of the houses 
in the little town were absolutely destroyed. I 
do not believe that there was a house in the place 
which had not been hit, and the number of shells 
that must have rained on that small area would 
have sufficed not so many years ago for the siege 
of a large town. The church was destroyed 
beyond any possibility of repair. The roof was 

13 



194 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

gone entirely, and large portions of the walls; a 
great piece of the tower had been blown clean out, 
and the tower itself was leaning dangerously. 
The bombardment of the church must have been 
terrific, for even the heavy pillars of the aisle 
had been snapped across. Of the altar only the 
solid stones remained, surrounded by fragments 
of what had once been the stained glass of the 
apse, and the twisted remains of the great brass 
candlesticks which had stood beside the altar. 
Only a few weeks ago this was an old parish church 
of singular beauty. Now even the graves in the 
churchyard have been torn open by the shells. 
These few battered walls, these heaps of stone 
and brick, are all that remain of a prosperous 
village and its ancient church. 

The dressing station of the Ambulance Corps 
was one of their most daring and successful ven- 
tures. At first it was placed close to the trenches 
and just behind the railway station, in the house 
of the village chemist. At least there were 
evidences in the existence of portions of walls, 
roof, and floors that it had once been a house, 
and the chemist had left a few bottles behind to 
indicate his trade. But I do. not think that any- 
one but a member of the Corps would have ever 
thought of living there. There was plenty o 1 
ventilation, of course, since there were no windows 




*M '''■' • 




PERVYSE— THE TRENCHES 195 

left, part of the roof had gone, and the walls were 
riddled with holes through which shells had passed 
clean across the building. It could hardly be 
described as a desirable residence, but it had one 
incomparable advantage: it possessed a cellar. 
A couple of mattresses and a few blankets con- 
verted it into a palace, whilst the limits of luxury- 
were reached when there arrived a new full-sized 
enamelled bath which one of the soldiers had 
discovered and hastened to present as a mark of 
gratitude. There was no water-supply, of course, 
and I do not think that there was a plug, but 
those were mere trifles. How such a white 
elephant ever found its way to Pervyse none of 
us will ever know. I do not believe that there 
was another for twenty miles around. 

In this strange residence — it could hardly be 
called a house — lived two of the lady members of 
the Corps. They were relieved from time to time, 
two others coming out to take their places, and 
every day they had visits from the ambulances 
which came out to pick up the wounded. A room 
on the ground floor was used during the day, 
partly as a living-room, partly as a surgery, and 
here were brought any soldiers wounded in this 
part of the lines. At night they retired to the 
cellar, as the house itself was far too dangerous. 
The Germans shelled Pervyse almost every night, 



196 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and sometimes in the day as well, and this par- 
ticular house was the most exposed of any in the 
town. But shells were not the only trouble, and 
when a few weeks later the cellars were filled with 
water, it was evident that other quarters must be 
found. 

Pervyse was of course entirely deserted by its 
inhabitants, but it could scarcely be called dull. 
We went out one afternoon to see what was going 
on, and found a party of the Corps at lunch. 
They seemed to be in particularly good spirits, 
and they told us that the house had just been 
struck by a shell, that the big Daimler ambulance 
had been standing outside, and that its bonnet 
had been riddled by the shrapnel bullets. We 
went outside to see for ourselves, and there we 
found a large hole in the side of the house, through 
which a shell had entered a room across the 
passage from that occupied by the Corps, who 
had fortunately chosen the lee-side. The big six- 
cylinder Daimler had been moved into a shed, 
and there it stood with twenty or more holes in 
its bonnet, but otherwise uninjured. By a stroke 
of luck the driver had gone inside the house for a 
moment or he would undoubtedly have been 
killed. It is fortunate that the Corps is possessed 
of such a keen sense of humour. 

Shells may be amusing in the daytime, but they 



PERVYSE— THE TRENCHES 197 

are not a bit amusing at night. Only two women 
with real solid courage could have slept, night 
after night, in that empty house in a ruined and 
deserted village, with no sounds to be heard but 
the rain and the wind, the splutter of the mitrail- 
leuse, and the shriek of shells. Courage is as 
infectious as fear, and I think that the soldiers, 
watching through the night in the trenches near 
by, must have blessed the women who were wait- 
ing there to help them, and must have felt braver 
men for their presence. 

Pervyse was protected by a wide screen of 
flood, and across this there was one way only — a 
slightly raised road going straight across six miles 
of water. No advance by either side was possible, 
for the road was swept by mitrailleuses, and to 
advance down it would have meant certain death. 
Half a mile down the road was a farmhouse held 
by a Belgian outpost, and beyond this, and per- 
haps half a mile away from it, were two other farms 
occupied by the Germans. We could see them 
moving amongst the trees. That piece of road 
between Pervyse and the Belgian farm was the 
scene of one of the very few lapses of the Germans 
into humanity. 

It was known one morning in the trenches at 
Pervyse that several of their comrades in the farm 
had been injured in an outpost engagement. It 



198 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

was, however, impossible to reach them before 
nightfall as the road was swept by the German 
guns. Two Belgian priests, taking their lives in 
their hands, walked out to the farm, but they 
found that the wounded were beyond their powers 
of carriage. Nothing daunted, they went on to 
one of the German farms and asked for help, and 
a few minutes later the astounded Belgians saw a 
little procession coming up the road. In front 
walked the two priests, and behind them came 
four wounded Belgians, lying on stretchers carried 
by German soldiers. They came right into the 
lines, and they had a royal welcome. They all 
shook hands, and the little party of Germans 
walked back down the road amid the cheers of 
their opponents. 

The spirit of chivalry is not dead in Germany; 
it is only stifled by her present rulers. Is it too 
much to hope that some day its voice may be 
heard and may command ? 



XXIII 
YPRES 

One morning early in December I was asked by 
Dr. Munro to run down with him in one of our 
motors to Ypres. A message had arrived saying 
that the town had been heavily shelled during the 
night, and that there were a number of children 
and of wounded there, who ought if possible to be 
removed to some less dangerous situation. So we 
started off to see what we could do for them. It 
was a dismal morning, and the rain was coming 
down in a steady drizzle which continued all day 
long, but fortunately we had a closed car, and we 
were protected from the elements. The road to 
Ypres is a broad avenue between long lines of tall 
trees, and to-day it was crowded with soldiers 
and transport motors. The French were moving 
up a large number of men to relieve and to support 
their lines between Dixmude and Ypres. Every 
little village seemed to be crowded with troops, 
for in this weather " the poorest village is better 
than the best bivouac," and the contrasts of the 
uniforms were very striking. Every type was 

199 



200 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

represented — the smart French officer, the Zouave, 
the Turco, and the Arab, and one could not help 
wondering what the Senegalese and the Algerians 
thought of this soaking rain, or how they would 
fare in the rigours of a Belgian winter. 

Like so many of the towns of Belgium, Ypres is 
a town of the past, and it is only in the light of its 
history that the meaning of its wonderful buildings 
can be realized, or an estimate formed of the 
vandalism of its destroyers. Its records date back 
to the year 900, and in the twelfth century it was 
already famous for its cloth. By the thirteenth 
century it was the richest and the most powerful 
city in Flanders, and four thousand looms gave 
occupation to its two hundred thousand inhabi- 
tants. These great commercial cities were also 
great military organizations, and there were few 
wars in the turbulence of the Middle Ages in 
which Ypres did not have a share. In fact, it was 
almost always engaged in fighting either England, 
or France, or one of the other Flemish towns. 

After a century of wars, to which Ypres once 
contributed no fewer than five thousand troops, 
the town was besieged by the English, led by 
Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with the help 
of the burghers of Ghent and Bruges. The town 
was surrounded by earthen ramparts planted with 
thick hedges of thorn, and by wide ditches and 



YPRES 201 

wooden palisades, and these were held by some 
ten thousand men. They were attacked, in 1383, 
by seventeen thousand English and twenty thou- 
sand Flemish. For two months Ypres was de- 
fended against almost daily attacks in one of the 
fiercest and most bloody sieges in history. At 
last Spencer saw that it was impossible to take 
the town by assault, and in view of the advance 
of a large French army he withdrew. Ypres was 
saved, but its prosperity was gone, for the bulk 
of its population had fled. The suburbs, where 
large numbers of the weavers worked, had been 
destroyed by the besiegers and the looms had been 
burnt. The tide of trade turned to Bruges and 
Ghent, though they did not enjoy for long the 
prosperity they had stolen. 

The commercial madness of the fourteenth 
century gave way to the religious madness of the 
sixteenth. Men's ideas were changing, and it is a 
very dangerous thing to change the ideas of men. 
For the momentum of the change is out of all 
proportion to its importance, and the barriers of 
human reason may melt before it. It is a mere 
matter of historical fact that no oppression has 
half the dangers of an obvious reform. At Ypres 
the Reformers were first in the field. They had 
swept through Flanders, destroying all the beauty 
and wealth that the piety of ages had accumulated, 



202 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and here was rich plunder for these apostles of the 
ugly. There is real tragedy in the thought that 
the Reformer is sometimes sincere. 

But at least the fanatics limited their fury to 
the symbols of religion. Philip of Spain could 
only be sated by flesh and blood, and for the next 
fifteen years Ypres was tossed to and fro in an 
orgy of persecution and war such as have rarely 
been waged even in the name of religion. At the 
end of that time only a miserable five thousand 
inhabitants remained within its broken ramparts. 

With the seventeenth century commerce and 
religion made way for politics, and the wars of 
Louis XIV. fell heavily on Ypres. On four 
separate occasions the town was taken by the 
French, and the dismantled fortifications which 
still surround it were once an example of the 
genius of Vauban. Yet with all these wars — com- 
mercial, religious, political — with all the violence 
of its history, Ypres had kept intact the glorious 
monuments of the days of her greatness, and it 
has been left for the armies of Culture to destroy 
that which even the hand of Philip spared. 

The centuries have handed down to us few 
buildings of such massive grandeur as the great 
Cloth Hall, a monument of the days when the 
Weavers of Ypres treated on equal terms with the 
Powers of England and of France. This huge 




The Cloth Hall, Ypres, after bombardment. 



YPRES 203 

fortress of the Guilds is about a hundred and fifty 
yards long. The ground floor was once an open 
loggia, but the spaces between its fifty pillars 
have been filled in. Above this are two rows of 
pointed windows, each exactly above an opening 
below. In the upper row every second window 
has been formed into a niche for the figure of some 
celebrity in the history of the town. A delicate 
turret rises at each end of the facade, and above 
it rose the high-pitched roof which was one of the 
most beautiful features of the building. In the 
centre is the great square tower, reaching to a 
height of more than two hundred feet, and ending 
in an elegant belfry, which rises between its four 
graceful turrets. The whole of this pile was 
finished in 1304; but in the seventeenth century 
there was added at its eastern end the Nieuwerck, 
an exquisite Renaissance structure supported 
entirely on a row of slim columns, with tiers of 
narrow oblong windows, and with elaborate gables 
of carved stone. The contrast between the 
strength and simplicity of the Gothic and the rich 
decoration of Spain is as delightful as it is bold. 
The upper part of this vast building formed one 
great hall, covered overhead by the towering roof. 
The walls were decorated by painted panels repre- 
senting the history of the town, and so large were 
these that in one bay there was erected the entire 



204 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

front of an old wooden house which had been 
pulled down in the town, gable and all. 

And all this is a heap of ruins. Whether any 
portion of it can ever be repaired I do not know, 
but the cost would be fabulous. The roof is en- 
tirely destroyed, and with it the whole of the great 
gallery and its paintings, for fire consumed what 
the shells had left. Only the bare stone walls 
remain, and as we stood among the pillars which 
had supported the floors above, it was difficult to 
realize that the heap of rubbish around us was all 
that was left of what had once been the envy of 
Europe. The only building which we have at all 
comparable to the Cloth Hall is the Palace of 
Westminster. If it were blasted by shells and 
gutted by fire, we might regret it, but what would 
be our feelings if it were the legacy of Edward the 
First, and had been handed down to us intact 
through six centuries ? 

Behind the Cloth Hall stands the Church of 
St. Martin, once for two and a half centuries the 
Cathedral of Ypres. It was largely built at the 
same time as the Cloth Hall, and it is a glorious 
monument of the architecture of the thirteenth 
century. Perhaps its most beautiful features are 
the great square tower, the lofty and imposing 
nave, and the exquisite rose window in the south 
wall of the transept, which is said to be the finest 



YPRES 205 

in Belgium. The tower was surrounded with 
scaffolding, and around its base were piles of 
stone, for the church was being repaired when the 
war began. I wonder if it will ever be repaired 
now. The Germans had expended on its destruc- 
tion many of their largest shells, and they had 
been very successful in their efforts. There were 
three huge holes in the roof of the choir where 
shells had entered, and in the centre of the transept 
was a pile of bricks and stone six feet high. Part 
of the tower had been shot away, and its stability 
was uncertain. The beautiful glass of the rose 
window had been utterly destroyed, and part of 
the tracery was broken. The old Parish Chapel 
on the south side of the nave had nothing left but 
the altar and four bare walls. The fine old roof 
and the great bronze screen which separated it 
from the nave had perished in the flames. The 
screen was lying in small fragments amongst the 
rubbish on the chapel floor, and at first I thought 
they were bits of rusty iron. 

As I stood in the ruins of the Parish Chapel 
looking round on this amazing scene, there was a 
roar overhead, and one of the big 14-inch shells 
passed, to explode with a terrific crash amongst 
the houses a few hundred yards farther on. It 
was plain that the bombardment was beginning 
again, and that we must see to our business with- 



206 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

out any delay. Two more shells passed over- 
head as I came out of the church, with a roar 
very different from the soft whistle of a small 
shell. The destruction produced by one of these 
large shells is astonishing. One large house into 
which a shell had fallen in the previous night 
had simply crumpled up. Portions of the walls 
and a heap of bricks were all that was left, a bit 
of an iron bedstead and a fragment of staircase 
sticking out from the debris. The roof, the floors, 
and the greater part of the walls might never have 
existed. In the Place in front of the Cathedral 
were two holes where shells had fallen, and either 
of them would have comfortably held a motor-car. 
The children were all together in a little street 
a quarter of a mile west of the Cathedral, just 
where the last three shells had fallen. Fortunately 
they had hurt no one, though one had passed 
clean through the upper stories of a house where 
there were several children being got ready by 
one of our party for removal. By good luck 
through some defect it did not explode, or the 
house would have been annihilated and everyone 
in it killed. Quite a collection of people had 
congregated in that little street, though why they 
considered it safer than the rest of the town I do 
not know. At first they were very unwilling to 
let any of the children go at all. But at last about 



YPRES 207 

twenty children were collected and were packed 
into ambulances. Some of them were without 
parents, and were being looked after by the 
neighbours, and the parents of some absolutely 
refused to leave. More children and a few adults 
to look after them were found later, and I think 
that in the end about a hundred were taken up 
to Furnes, to be sent on to Calais as refugees. 

The children were as merry as crickets, and 
regarded it all as a huge joke; sitting in the ambu- 
lances, they looked for all the world like a school 
treat. But I have often wondered whether we 
were right to take them away or whether it would 
not have been better to have left them to take 
their chance. War is a very terrible thing, and 
the well-meant interference of the kind-hearted 
may do far more harm than good. What is going 
to happen to those children ? I suppose that they 
are in some refugee home, to remain there till the 
war is over. And then ? We did our best to 
identify them, but what are the chances that many 
of them will ever see their parents again ? From 
what I have seen of these things I do not think that 
they are very large. Perhaps you will say that 
the parents ought to have gone with them. It is 
easy for the well-to-do to leave their homes and 
to settle again elsewhere; but the poorer a man is 
the less can he afford to leave what little he pos- 



208 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

sesses. In their own town they might be in 
danger, but at least they had not lost their homes, 
and they possessed the surroundings without 
which their individual lives would be merged in 
the common ocean of misery. The problem of the 
civil population, and especially of the children, in 
time of war is entirely beyond the scope of indi- 
vidual effort. It is a matter with which only a 
Government or a very powerful organization can 
deal, and it is a matter in which Governments do 
not take a great deal of interest. Their hands are 
quite full enough in trying to defeat the enemy. 

In all previous wars between civilized nations a 
certain regard has been paid to the safety of the 
civilian population, and especially of the women 
and children. But from the very first the German 
policy has been to utterly ignore the rights of non- 
combatants, tearing up the conventions which 
they themselves had signed for their protection. 
No Government could be expected to be prepared 
for such a total apostasy from the elementary 
principles of civilized society, or to anticipate 
methods at which a Zulu might blush. If they 
had done so, it should have been their first care 
to remove all non-combatants from the area of 
fighting, and to make provision for them else- 
where. It is unfair that a civilian should be left 
with the hopeless choice of leaving a child in a 



YPRES 209 

house where it may at any moment be killed by a 
shell or taking it away with a considerable proba- 
bility that it will be a homeless orphan. For life 
is a matter of small moment; it is living that 
matters. 

The problem of the children of Belgium will be 
one of the most serious to be faced when the war 
is over. There will be a great number of orphans, 
whilst many more will be simply lost. They must 
not be adopted in England, for to them Belgium 
will look for her future population. There could 
be few finer ways in which we could show our 
gratitude to the people of Belgium than by estab- 
lishing colonies over there where they could be 
brought up in their own country, to be its future 
citizens. It would form a bond between the two 
countries such as no treaty could ever establish, 
and Belgium would never forget the country 
which had been the foster-mother of her children. 

But Ypres gave us yet another example of 
German methods of war. On the western side of 
the town, some distance from the farthest houses, 
stood the Asylum. It was a fine building arranged 
in several wings, and at present it was being used 
for the accommodation of a few wounded, mostly 
women and children, and several old people of the 
workhouse infirmary type. It made a magnificent 
hospital, and as it was far away from the town and 

14 



210 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

was not used for any but the purposes of a hospital, 
we considered that it was safe enough, and that 
it would be a pity to disturb the poor old people 
collected there. We might have known better. 
The very next night the Germans shelled it to 
pieces, and all those unfortunate creatures had 
to be removed in a hurry. There is a senseless 
barbarity about such an act which could only 
appeal to a Prussian. 



XXIV 

SOME CONCLUSIONS 

To draw conclusions from a limited experience is 
a difficult matter, and the attempt holds many 
pitfalls for the unwary. Yet every experience 
must leave on the mind of any thinking man 
certain impressions, and the sum of these only 
he himself can give. To others he can give but 
blurred images of all he may have seen, distorted 
in the curving mirrors of his mind, but from these 
they can at least form some estimate of the truth 
of the conclusions he ventures to draw. For 
myself, these conclusions seem to fall naturally 
into three separate groups, for I have met the 
experiences of the past three months in three 
separate ways — as a surgeon, as a Briton, and as, 
I hope, a civilized man. It is from these three 
aspects that I shall try to sum up what I have 
seen. 

As a surgeon it has been my good fortune to 
have charge of a hospital whose position was 
almost ideal. Always close to the front, we 
received our cases at the earliest possible moment, 

211 



212 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

and could deal with them practically first hand. 
Every day I realized more strongly the advantages 
of such a hospital, and the importance for the 
wounded of the first surgical treatment they 
receive. Upon this may well depend the whole 
future course of the case. No wounded man 
should be sent on a long railway journey to the 
base until he has passed through the hands of a 
skilled surgeon, and has been got into such a con- 
dition that the journey does not involve undue 
risk. And no rough routine treatment will suffice. 
A surgeon is required who can deal with desperate 
emergencies and pull impossible cases out of the 
fire — a young man who does not believe in the 
impossible, and who can adapt himself to condi- 
tions of work that would make an older man 
shudder, and a man who will never believe what 
he is told until he has seen it for himself. For 
the conditions of work at the front are utterly 
different from those of civil practice, and it is 
impossible for any man after many years of 
regular routine to adapt himself to such changed 
environment. The long experience of the older 
man will be of far more use at the base, and he 
will have plenty of difficulties to contend with 
there. 

I have often been told that there is no opening 
for skilled surgery at the front. In my opinion 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 213 

there is room for the highest skill that the pro- 
fession can produce. It is absurd to say that the 
abdominal cases should be left to die or to recover 
as best they can, that one dare not touch a frac- 
tured femur because it is septic. To take up such 
an attitude is simply to admit that these cases are 
beyond the scope of present surgery. In a sense, 
perhaps, they are, but that is all the more reason 
why the scope of surgery should be enlarged, and 
not that these cases should be left outside its pale. 
I am far from advising indiscriminate operating. 
There are many things in surges besides scalpels. 
But I do urge the need for hospitals close to the 
front, with every modern equipment, and with 
surgeons of resource and energy. 

But for a surgeon this war between nations is 
only an incident in the war to which he has 
devoted his life — the war against disease. It is a 
curious reflection that whilst in the present war 
the base hospital has been given, if anything, an 
undue importance, in the other war it has been 
practically neglected. Our great hospitals are 
almost entirely field hospitals, planted right in the 
middle of the battle, and there we keep our 
patients till such time as they are to all intents 
and purposes cured. A very few convalescent 
homes will admit cases which still require treat- 
ment, but only a very few. The bulk of them 



214 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

expect their inmates to do the work of the estab- 
lishment. Now, this is most unreasonable, for a 
country hospital is cheaper to build and should 
cost less to run than one in town, and in many- 
cases the patients will recover in half the time. 
Our hospitals in London are always crowded, the 
waiting-lists mount up till it seems hopeless to 
attack them, and all the time it is because we 
have no base hospital down in the country to 
which our patients might be sent to recover. I 
wonder how long it will be before each of the 
great London hospitals has its own base down in 
the country, with its own motor ambulances and 
its own ambulance coaches to carry its patients 
in comfort by rail to surroundings where they 
could recover as can never be possible in the 
middle of the London slums ? And as to getting 
the staff to look after it, there would probably be 
a waiting-list for week-ends. 

But there are more important considerations in 
this war than surgery, and one would have to be 
very blind not to perceive that this is a life-and- 
death struggle between Britain and Germany. 
The involvement of other nations is merely acci- 
dental. It is ourselves whom Germany is making 
this huge effort to crush, and but for one small 
circumstance she would have come within v 
measurable prospect of success. To swoop down 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 215 

on France through Belgium, to crush her in three 
weeks, to seize her fleet, and with the combined 
fleets of France and Germany to attack ours — 
that was the proposition, and who can say that 
it might not have succeeded ? The small circum- 
stance which Germany overlooked was Belgium, 
and it is to the heroic resistance of Belgium that 
we owe the fact that the German advance has 
been stopped. 

At the cost of the desolation of their own 
country, Belgium has perhaps saved the flag of 
Britain, for where would it have flown on the seas 
if Germany had won ? And at the very least she 
has saved us from a war beside which this is 
nothing — a war not now, but a few years hence, 
when she might have controlled half the Con- 
tinent, and we should have stood alone. We owe 
an incalculable debt to Belgium, and we can only 
repay it by throwing into this war every resource 
that our country has to offer. For the only end 
which can bring peace to Europe is the total 
annihilation of Germany as a military and naval 
Power. What other terms can be made with a 
nation which regards its most solemn treaties as 
so much waste paper, which is bound by no con- 
ventions, and which delights in showing a callous 
disregard of all that forms the basis of a civilized 
society ? The only guarantees that we can take 



216 A SURGEON IN BELGIUM 

are that she has no ships of war, and that her 
army is only sufficient to police her frontier. The 
building of a war vessel or the boring of a gun 
must be regarded as a casus belli. Then, and then 
only, shall Europe be safe from the madness that 
is tearing her asunder. 

But there is a wider view of this war than even 
that of Britain. We are not merely fighting to 
preserve the pre-eminence of our country; we are 
fighting for the civilization of the world. The 
victory of Germany would mean the establish- 
ment over the whole world of a military despotism 
such as the world has never seen. For if once the 
navy of Britain is gone, who else can stop her 
course ? Canada, the United States, South 
America, would soon be vassals of her power — a 
power which would be used without scruple for 
her own material advantage. This is not a war 
between Germany and certain other nations; it is 
a war between Germany and civilization. The 
stake is not a few acres of land, but the freedom 
for which our fathers gave their lives. 

Is there such a thing as neutrality in this war ? 
Germany herself gave the answer when she in- 
vaded Belgium. It is the undoubted duty of 
many great nations, and of one before all others, 
to stand aside and not to enter the struggle; 
but to be neutral at heart, not to care whether 



SOME CONCLUSIONS 217 

the battle is won or lost, is impossible for any 
nation which values honour and truth above the 
passing advantages of worldly power. We do not 
ask America to fight on our side. This is our 
fight, and only Britain and her Allies can see it 
through. But we do ask for a sympathy which, 
while obeying the laws of neutrality to the last 
letter, will support us with a spirit which is bound 
by no earthly law, which will bear with us when 
in our difficult task we seem to neglect the in- 
terests of our friends, and will rejoice with us 
when, out of toil and sorrow, we have won a 
lasting peace. 

This war is not of our choosing, and we shall 
never ask for peace. The sword has been thrust 
into our hands by a power beyond our own to 
defend from a relentless foe the flag which has 
been handed down to us unsullied through the 
ages, and to preserve for the world the freedom 
which is the proudest birthright of our race. 
When it is sheathed, the freedom of the world 
from the tyranny of man will have been secured. 



BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, OUILDFORD, ENOLAND 



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